data centre

The Green case for data centres doesn’t stack up

Billy MacInnes asks why the Minister for the Environment is so in favour of power-hogging data centres
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28 September 2023

Just over a week ago, Fingal County Council decided that Ireland still didn’t have quite enough data centres and approved the building of three more by Amazon. And I have to admit, it would take a heart of stone to mock the council’s decision when you consider that poor Amazon only has a measly three data centres in the country at the moment.

In any case, it’s hard to oppose the granting of permission to build more data centres when it sometimes seems that the government policy towards them is much like a version of The Late Late Toy Show where Eamon Ryan is standing in front of us shouting “and there’s one for everybody in the audience”.

Not quite. Not yet. But the Minister for the Environment who is, supposedly, a member of the Green Party, has an interesting perspective on data centres, describing them as “a key component of Ireland’s infrastructure”. Mind you, the Green Party doesn’t seem to be particularly vocal on the subject. A search for ‘data centre’ on the party’s website, returns only three results, none of which appear relevant.

 

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In June, Ryan was even more effusive: “Data centres are a really important, beneficial sector for our country,” he said. We have a huge advantage of having them here in terms of the potential industries that are based here that come with it.”

Well, they’re definitely key to Ireland’s infrastructure alright, at least in terms of being a drain on the country’s electricity grid by accounting for 18% of total power consumption in Ireland last year. That’s the same as was used by all households in Ireland’s urban areas.

It is nothing short of amazing that anyone looking at the huge surge in data centre electricity usage, especially someone in government and, even more so, someone in the Green Party, does not think it presents an incontrovertible case for ending the present strategy.

Let’s take a closer look at those proposed Amazon data centres, for instance. According to reports, the data centres will require an additional 73MW of electricity. That might not mean anything to most people, so let’s put it into perspective. In 2022, the largest wind farm in Ireland had a capacity of 169MW.

So the Amazon data centres would account for 43% of the capacity of that wind farm. In the same year, according to figures from Wind Energy Ireland, wind farms added 280MW of additional capacity to the grid in Ireland. If the planned Amazon data centres had been in operation, they would have swallowed up 26% of that new capacity.

Bear that in mind when you read the following sentence from the Irish Times report on Fingal County Council’s decision: “There are at least 10 data centres making their way through the planning system, with over 40 granted approval and a further 14 under construction, according to the most recent data from bitpower, a consultancy firm that tracks the Irish data hosting sector.”

With those statistics, it’s hard to dispute claims that data centres could account for 30% of Ireland’s electricity consumption by 2030.

It’s probably worth mentioning that, according to Wind Energy Ireland, wind energy provided 34% of the country’s electricity in December 2022. Impressive stuff, until you remember that data centre energy consumption amounted to more than half of that renewable energy.

And this brings us to the part of the discussion where we start to hear about data centres being tasked to only source their energy from renewable sources as if, somehow, this is a panacea to the problem. It isn’t because the proliferation in data centres is displacing cheaper, cleaner, greener renewable energy from ordinary households.

Unless Ireland has the capability to radically increase the share of renewable energy in its overall energy capacity, ordinary people and households will have to wait longer to benefit from greener energy than if the government that represents them called a halt to data centre development.

As Oisín Coughlan, chief executive, Friends of the Earth Ireland, said: “Even if they say they’re going to use renewables, it means that there’s less renewables for the rest of us. So the rest of us have to use gas or coal from Moneypoint to keep the lights on.”

And there’s the rub. By approving a huge increase in data centre development in Ireland, the leader of the Green Party is ensuring that citizens who he is happy to exhort to switch to green methods of transport, for example, have to use more environmentally unfriendly energy sources for longer because he wants data centres to use the renewable energy instead.

Commenting on the current situation, Coughlan made the very fair point that while it’s fair that Ireland should have data centres, “we just don’t need to have every data centre that’s going in Europe”.

Unfortunately, he didn’t know that “having every data centre that’s going in Europe” was government policy.

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