FUD surrounds scale of data centre impact
If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that Ireland gets a lot of rain. There are days when it feels as if the weather forecast could be: “Today there will be heavy rain across the country with the occasional burst of light rain and intermittent torrential downpours.”
With rain, comes water. One thing we don’t have a shortage of is water. Well, not often at any rate. Now, imagine if, even with all that water, someone came along and just took 18% of it and said they would be taking at least a quarter of all Ireland’s water by 2026 and up to 29% or more, by 2028. Imagine that!
How would you feel if you then heard that nearly all of the water being taken was to be used to provide services to people all over Europe and the world? If you were informed that losing all that water for another purpose might lead to outages in the supply of water to your home, your child’s school, to hospitals, hotels, office blocks, etc.
That’s essentially what Ireland is doing at the moment with its electricity supply by allowing the construction of so many data centres here. There are more than 80 data centres in this country today and only five of them are not located in the Dublin region. The Irish Times quoted figures from Bitpower in June last year estimating that “a further 14 centres are under construction, while planning has been approved for 40 more in 22 projects. There are a further 12 planning applications filed related to six projects”.
We can’t be sure because, weirdly, the government doesn’t collect figures for the number of data centres in Ireland. That’s quite something when you realise that data centre electricity usage rose by 31% between 2021 and 2022 to the equivalent to all urban households in Ireland. Imagine if our water was being drained in the same quantities, would we really be as sanguine about it?
As Social Democrats TD Jennifer Whitmore told The Irish Times last year: “I do not believe this information is collected centrally. The Dept of Enterprise, Trade & Employment and Dept of Environment, Climate & Communications do not have it, and I do not believe any other entity knows exactly how many data centres there are, where they are, what their energy usage is and what the demand is… It is astonishing that no entity has oversight and visibility of exactly what data centres are using.”
Astonishing.
Now, according to a report on The Register, Amazon could be restricting the resources users can spin up in Ireland and directing them to other AWS regions across Europe instead. Power limitations appear to be the cause of these restrictions.
While Amazon and EirGrid did not directly concede as much, EirGrid’s statement to The Register hints at it. “As part of its role, EirGrid supplies electricity directly to large energy users, which includes larger data centres connected directly to the transmission system,” EirGrid stated. “EirGrid may from time to time request large energy users to reduce their energy use as part of our demand side management.”
Let’s stop and think about that for a moment. Even without all the other planned data centres connected to the grid, the rate of increase in demand from data centres appears to be having consequences already. The good news, for the moment, is that the effects are being felt by users of data centres rather than the general populace of Ireland. Let’s hope it stays that way but it’s hard to see how the exponential increase in electricity usage by data centres is sustainable.
And there’s an awful irony in the fact users are being directed to data centres elsewhere in Europe because of power limitations in Ireland. If this country didn’t have such an unbalanced data centre strategy – Dublin hosts around 25% of all data centres in Europe – those AWS customers would already be using data centres in other parts of Europe. The load would be spread more evenly with electricity demand from data centres dispersed more equally across a wider range of countries.
Imagine that!
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