DATA CENTRES IN Ireland consumed 31% more electricity in 2022 than in the previous year, according to figures released by the Central Statistics Office.
Ireland currently has 75 data centres in operation and last year they accounted for 18% of the country’s electricity use, up from 14% in 2021, which is equivalent to the amount used by all urban dwellings.
“That’s a significant amount,” says Paul Deane, energy expert and professor at UCC.
“That also means that they are responsible for the same amount of pollution now in terms of greenhouse gases as all the urban dwellings in Ireland and that’s a lot considering where we need to go in terms of our decarbonization.”
In 2017, the government announced that Ireland was to become the data centre capital of the world. That project appears to be very much on track as the number of centres and the amount of power they consume have risen considerably in recent years.
Ireland’s data centres are mostly owned by US tech companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft and since the beginning of 2015 the amount of power used by the industry has increased by 400%, according to the CSO report.
Last year data centres consumed almost twice as much power as all rural dwellings combined (10%).
The number of data centres in Ireland is not exactly huge, says Deane, but the impact they have on the energy grid is enormous.
“They consume a huge amount of electricity. A data centre would consume the same amount of electricity as a big town or a small city, for example. So we don’t need many of them have such an outsized impact on the electricity grid.”
While the government has been enthusiastically welcoming the growth of this sector, there have been concerns raised by opposition politicians and environmental campaigners over how much electricity data centres consume.
Earlier this month, the EPA released a report projecting that Ireland will “fall well short” of its climate targets as things stand, with the Agency predicting a 29% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared to the government’s target of 51%.
The report stated that all sectors of the economy are set to exceed their emission ceilings and the increasing electricity consumption in the figures released by the CSO are certainly emblematic of that trend.
Speaking in response to the publication of the CSO statistics, minister for the environment Eamon Ryan said that the growth of the industry could be accommodated within the limits set by emissions targets.
“Every sector has to live within its climate limits,” he said. “No sector gets an out.”
He also outlined the economic benefits that Ireland gets from hosting data centres.
“The data centres are a very important, beneficial sector for our country. We have a huge advantage of having them here in terms of the digital industries that are based here that come with it.
“We can deliver the clean electricity that will give them a sustainable future here but we can’t break the climate budget in the meantime, so we do have to make sure that they fit within it,” he said.
Ryan said that working in collaboration with the industry was the right approach.
“There are ways we can do this and we will get it right, working with data centres rather than what some of the opposition do is just blame them. That doesn’t work.”
At a time when most other European countries are attempting to scale back their electricity usage due in part to the recent energy crisis, Ireland is heading in the other direction by growing this particularly energy intensive sector of the economy.
“We put on a significant amount of electricity demand onto our system at a time when we’re experiencing one of the worst energy crisis in Europe of the last 40 years,” says Deane.
“Ireland really bucks the trend here right across Europe. We’re one of the very few countries to grow our energy demand for electricity at a time of an energy crisis when we should reduce it.”
Government policy in this regard is at odds with both the government’s climate targets but also its public messaging on personal energy consumption, according to Deane.
“There have been very good public information campaigns from the government encouraging us to also reduce our energy use, but at the same time there is an industrial policy in Ireland are promoting increasing use of electricity. This is very difficult to resolve.
“The optics are terrible.”
According to Deane, Ireland needs to decide whether to prioritise economic development or environmental improvement. Doing both, he says, is extremely difficult.
“It’s very difficult to reduce our emissions and to grow our electricity demand at the same time.”
He acknowledges the benefits that data centres provide to the economy in terms of jobs, revenue and remote working but the government has difficult decisions to make as economic development and reducing emissions rarely go hand in hand.
“Really, Ireland’s at a crossroads. We need to decide, do we want to reduce our pollution from greenhouse gases? Or do you want to grow our economy? Because the two are very difficult at the moment.”
People Before Profit TD Brid Smith said the statistics showed the government’s policy regarding data centres was “madness for which ordinary people would pay a high price.”
She described the news as unsurprising, saying Ireland “is unique in Europe in having increased energy demands and this is almost wholly down to the proliferation of data centres”.
Social Democrats TD Jennifer Whitmore also responded to the publication of the figures by criticising the government’s approach to the industry.
“Data centres put pressure on our national grid, make it more difficult to reach our climate action targets and can lead to rising energy prices. The need for strategic oversight and management of data centres by the Government could not be clearer,” she said.
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