WTF? Throwing 10,000 a month each at private data centres of mega rich companies to pay for their electricity to drain our grid? Would it not be better to buy a few solar panels for poor families with high electricity bills reducing their demand a bit? Is this really good energy policy?

15 comments

  2. So they want us to keep paying universal social charge so that they can give our tax money to data centers.

    I don’t see how this government are not thrown out of power.

  4. Welcome to the great rip off. Obviously some cunt of the highest order crunched some numbers during lockdown of energy usage and companies/government discovered the new cash cow. Oxegen and methane expulsion will be next. Anything to extort people of money.

  7. It’s not “public money” in that sense.

    The Government are making payments to all energy consumers to reduce the impact of increased costs. In turn, they’re going to impose windfall taxes on energy companies making unjustified profits, and that windfall tax will go back to fill up the pot from which the payments were drawn in the first place.

  8. The corporation tax take this year is expected to be €20 billion… much of it coming from tech companies. We’ve less than 100 data centres; that a maximum of €1 million that were going to hand over to these companies.

    What’s the difference between a billion and a million? The answer is about a billion.

    I think we’re doing okay out of this relationship! These companies are the very reason why many in this country can afford to pay their electricity bill this year.

  9. Madness!, These must have hardly any staff I passed one and seen only two cars in the place the other day, so don’t see how it’s contributing to our economy other than keeping the multinationals happy

  10. Whats the problem? Aren’t the mega rich companies essentially subdising Ireland & providing loads of well paid jobs, without them we’d be like Albania.

  11. Irony alert, everyone spewing bile at data centres whilst simultaneously using Reddit.
    Where is all the data being generated by Reddit and it’s bots being held?
    It’s not the weir wood tree!

  13. On the surface this seems like an insane idea, but if you think about the jobs that a data Center offers (I’m not just talking about the people in the DC maintaining servers etc) but all the Devs, system’s engineers, network engineers, project managers the list goes on, the income tax alone from the pyramid of people needed far outweighs this.

    Data Centre’s have almost become a dirty word but without them we would have little to no tech and considering the current estimates we have 80,000 people employed in this sector (that also happens to be one of the higher payed jobs) would be a huge hit so the benefit they give to the country like it or not is huge.

    I think we need more of them BUT with more better regulations on them .ie energy efficient and reusing expended heat to head schools collages housing estates etc (I believe some of the newer ones are already doing this) and big incentives for renewable energy so we can increase wind farms or solar or hydro.

    If we are smart we can use these to a massive advantage in this country.

  14. There are about 70 datacenters in Ireland. So this could possibly cost 700,000 Euro. Now this is the equivalent of people going crazy as you left the shower cord light on when not using the shower. There are much more bigger F ups that should be getting attention.

  15. This government only want to give the rich people more money. That’s their whole MO. Be it via electricity bills, private healthcare or housing, this is standard FFG policy at this stage

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