{"id":57689,"date":"2026-06-07T05:53:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T05:53:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/57689\/"},"modified":"2026-06-07T05:53:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T05:53:07","slug":"power-hungry-data-centres-fuel-increasingly-fractious-debate-about-squeezed-national-grid-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/57689\/","title":{"rendered":"Power-hungry data centres fuel increasingly fractious debate about squeezed national grid \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

The UN report that this week<\/a> cited Ireland as a cautionary tale of how not to develop a data centre<\/a> industry contained some fascinating nuggets of information.<\/p>\n

For example, being polite in Artificial Intelligence<\/a> (AI) communications can have a sizeable impact on electricity use. <\/p>\n

\u201cGetting rid of politeness by not saying \u2018please\u2019 and \u2018thank you\u2019 can reduce the overall footprint significantly,\u201d it says. <\/p>\n

\u201cA concise response mode can reduce ChatGPT token output by 30 per cent, saving 87-98 GWh of electricity per year, equivalent to the annual residential electricity of nearly 760,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa.\u201d <\/p>\n

The advice may seem a little cold in a world where AI is trying its best to appear human, but arguably, the politeness has already gone out of the data centre debate. <\/p>\n

That debate has been raging since June 2021, when a senior manager in EirGrid wrote to the energy regulator, the Commission for Regulation of Utilities, expressing concern at the ever-growing electricity demand of data centres. <\/p>\n

He was probably the first to put the problem in terms the public could understand, saying data centres each had, or were seeking to have, electricity usage that was the equivalent of a large town or small city such as Kilkenny. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt surely must … give rise to consideration and potentially wider national debate as to that which is in the public interest in this regard,\u201d he wrote. <\/p>\n

Five years on, the problem of how to accommodate the power-ravenous needs of data centres in an electricity system that is flat out trying to keep up remains unresolved. <\/p>\n

As the UN report pointed out (as have many public bodies, academics, energy experts and environmental NGOs before it), the State\u2019s 121 data centres consume one-fifth of all electricity in the State. <\/p>\n

That is forecast to rise to more than 30 per cent in the next five years based on planned new data centres that have already been promised connection to the electricity grid. <\/p>\n

Ireland has seen a sharp increase in the amount of data centres in operation in recent years, but are they necessary for economic growth? Video: Enda O’Dowd <\/p>\n

Then there is the question of what to do about all the other data centres that tech companies have signalled they want to locate here. <\/p>\n

The strain means insufficient electricity for other kinds of development in some areas and, as the Climate Change Advisory Council put it last week, that any additional renewable energy generated is being \u201ccannibalised\u201d by data centres instead of displacing fossil fuel generation. <\/p>\n

Friends of the Earth also produced a study last week \u2013 disputed by the data centre industry \u2013 that said data centre electricity demand was increasing household electricity bills. <\/p>\n

The environmental NGO is one of three granted leave to judicially review the State\u2019s data centre energy policy \u2013 for those additional data centres signalled by investors \u2013 in a case scheduled for hearing in April next year. <\/p>\n

What has been construed as an onslaught of negative publicity has led Taoiseach Miche\u00e1l Martin to declare that data centres are being \u201cdemonised\u201d. <\/p>\n

T\u00e1naiste Simon Harris says they are being treated as \u201cbogeymen\u201d and Minister for Enterprise Peter Burke this week implied near total economic wipeout should their further expansion be constrained. <\/p>\n

Asked about the UN report on RTE\u2019s Morning Ireland this week, Minister for Energy Darragh O\u2019Brien insisted the Republic was the envy of Europe<\/a>, if not the world, for being able to attract so much data centre investment, but his annoyance was audible and at odds with his usual ebullient persona. <\/p>\n

The sector itself has felt so under fire that earlier this year it formed a new industry body\/lobby group, the Irish Data Centre Supplier Alliance, even though there is already a very active industry body\/lobby group, Digital Infrastructure Ireland. <\/p>\n

Despite all of this, the sector shows no signs of giving up on this State as a preferred location. <\/p>\n

The Republic\u2019s appeal is threefold \u2013 corporation tax, climate and cables. <\/p>\n

Corporation tax rates are relatively low and are the reason many multinationals are attracted here. <\/p>\n

The relatively stable climate and low temperatures here mean data centres do not need huge volumes of water for cooling their giant servers \u2013 an extremely contentious issue in other countries. <\/p>\n

As for transatlantic cables for internet traffic, most of them come through Irish waters, and many make landfall in Ireland. <\/p>\n

Data centre developers have also been finding ways around the electricity supply issue. <\/p>\n

The Pure Data Centres company was refused an electricity connection in Dublin because of the strain on supply there, so they created a \u201cmicrogrid\u201d, which makes them an \u201cislanded\u201d operation. <\/p>\n

In other words, they\u2019ve been using fossil gas and burning it on-site to generate their own electricity. <\/p>\n

This week, they announced they had bought biomethane \u2013 renewable gas made from waste animal and plant material \u2013 from Germany, equivalent to the amount of fossil gas they use and had it injected into the gas pipeline that runs underwater from Scotland to Ireland. <\/p>\n

The renewable gas may not directly go to their data centres but through a certification system that vouches for their purchase, they are allowed to declare their facility decarbonised. <\/p>\n

Management made it clear, however, that they would prefer not to have to be involved in energy generation and still hoped to get a connection to the electricity grid in the future. <\/p>\n

Also this week, in a sign that data centre operators are looking beyond the congested Dublin-Meath sites where almost all of the industry is located, Red Admiral Data Centres received planning permission for a facility at Rochfortbridge, Co Westmeath. <\/p>\n

It will also run on fossil gas-fired electricity, but in combination with solar energy from an adjacent solar farm, it also received permission to develop as part of the project. <\/p>\n

And in another development this week, the long-running planning battle by Art Data Centres<\/a> to build a campus outside Ennis, Co Clare, came to an end when the High Court dismissed the latest challenge against it. <\/p>\n

The developers have said their facility will also run off-grid or as an islanded operation, buying offsets from wind, solar and biogas suppliers. <\/p>\n

Data centre companies often say their demand for offsets underpins the roll-out of renewables. Environmental, climate and energy experts often argue it sucks up all available renewables, making decarbonisation of the wider energy system harder. <\/p>\n

Whether politely or impolitely expressed or not, the argument looks set to rage for some time yet. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The UN report that this week cited Ireland as a cautionary tale of how not to develop a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57690,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[21249],"tags":[2096,5356,28156,28157,2580],"class_list":["post-57689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-national-grid","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-data-centres","tag-fianna-fail","tag-fine-gael","tag-national-grid"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116707275706463682","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}