South Dublin County Council refuses permission for gas-powered data centre

South Dublin County Council has refused planning permission to US data centre builder Equinix to construct a gas-powered facility.

Equinix has planning permission in place for a data centre at Profile Park, Nangor Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 22, to be powered by electricity but the firm has not received a commercial or technical offer to supply permanent power to the site. As a result Equinix was seeking a new planning permission for the data centre so that it could be powered by gas.

Equinix operates data centres at Northwest Business Park, Citywest, Blanchardstown and Kilcarbery Park, and globally operates 240 data centres in 71 locations. The company’s clients include Oracle, Google Cloud, Dell Technologies, AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Cisco.

Planning consultants for Equinix, Brock McClure, told the council that Equinix’s four operating Dublin-based data centre sites “have become the gateway to the US as US-based content companies must host EU customs data within Europe”.

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Equinix told the council that it has tried to secure a connection with EirGrid for the permitted data centre at Profile Park but has not been successful in doing so, and that it has been verbally confirmed by ESB that it can make a proposal for power supply to the site in six to eight years.

Equinix was seeking to have in place a gas-powered data centre pending the ESB power connection.

However, the council has refused planning permission after concluding that the applicant has failed to demonstrate that the proposed development had an appropriate grid connection.

The council also refused planning due to the existing insufficient capacity in the electricity grid, the lack of a fixed connection agreement to connect to the grid, the lack of significant on-site renewable energy to power the proposed development and the reliance on a gas-powered plant to provide energy to the development.

Brock McClure said that the project would “contribute to the emerging digital infrastructure that helps to support a strong Irish economy”.

Brock McClure also said that with the proposed data centre being powered by gas the overall project would have no impact on the electricity grid in the short to medium term, but did concede that there was “uncertainty around the timing of grid connection”.

Brock McClure told the council that the proposal would “deliver a high-quality development on this commercially-zoned site earmarked for data centre development at Profile Park”.