Una Mullally: Data centres reveal truth of Ireland’s climate double-speak

As data centres become a massive drain on Irish electricity and water, at what point will someone shout “Stop”? Ireland is an attractive location for data centres because of our low-level seismic activity and relatively mild climate, with a lack of extreme temperatures, although climate change will continue to affect the latter.

Ireland also appears to be very attractive for these massive construction projects because apparently, in the midst of a housing crisis, you can build pretty much anything in Ireland apart from houses.

When Tánaiste Leo Varadkar spoke to an Oireachtas committee at the end of June, he offered up quite the riff on data. “It is gold. It is diamonds. Why would you not want it to be stored in your country?”

Varadkar said he had seen figures that put the electricity demands of data centres at as much as a third of all our electricity

The head-holding silliness of this remark aside, it sounds like something someone from a tech company would say. One wonders whose interests are actually being served here. Yes, data is valuable – to tech companies. Varadkar admitted that the benefit of having these colossal energy-sucking blocks in the country, taking up enormous amounts of land and blighting the landscape, isn’t so much about the relatively small number of maintenance jobs they provide, or the temporary jobs in their construction (presumably builders will be flat out anyway building all these public houses the State still hasn’t got around to).

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No, it’s about tethering tech companies to Ireland. “It is your safe,” he said of data centres, “and you never move too far away from your safe. That is why there is an advantage for us in having data centres in Ireland.”

Tax pariah

This obsession with pleasing big tech – no matter the ropey morals of companies such as Facebook and Amazon – is tiresome and totally regressive. What more do big tech companies need from Ireland?

We’re already a pariah when it comes to global tax policy. But the Irish Government is not going into this latest scheme eyes closed. The incredible demands on energy are known. Varadkar even said at that committee that those energy demands were “extraordinary”.

Before the decade is out, it is estimated that 27 per cent of all the electricity we produce will be needed to power these data centres. Varadkar said he had seen figures that put the electricity demands of data centres at as much as a third of all our electricity.

This is insane.

With the proliferation of data centres on such an extraordinary scale, the Government is putting its industrial policy at odds with sustainability policy

Over the past year alone, the number of operational data centres here increased 25 per cent. There are now 70 operational data centres here. The Greater Dublin Area is now the largest hub for data centres in Europe. Amazon’s latest plans for Mulhuddart will need the same amount of electricity as a small city.

Increasingly, EirGrid, which runs the national grid, sounds like it’s freaking out, understandably. They say data centres are “having a major impact on the Irish electricity system currently and into the foreseeable future”. That doesn’t sound very good, does it? Right now, data centres are using 7 per cent of our energy production, which will jump to about 15 per cent in the next five years.

Last summer an analysis by Killian Woods in the Business Post showed that data centres were using the same amount of water as some of our largest towns. Athlone, he wrote, uses about 2.6 million litres of water a day. Irish Water say that an average data centre uses 500,000 to five million litres a day, the high end of that scale being rare but possible.

Green-washing

When it comes to the huge amounts of electricity (for powering) and water (for cooling) data centres use, big tech companies are keen to green-wash, and talk about green and renewable energy, and say things like their emissions are “net-zero”.

But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t using colossal amounts of energy and water. What’s happening is, tech companies are buying and building wind farms. Why are we now in a situation, having never fully capitalised on the potential of renewable energy on this island, where wind farms are being built and bought to offset big tech energy demands?

How is this in any way sustainable? Why are we complicating our already struggling efforts to meet our climate commitments by throwing this spanner in the works? I thought the Green Party was in government?

With the proliferation of data centres on such an extraordinary scale, the Government is putting its industrial policy at odds with sustainability policy. This is unacceptable. Who benefits bar the tech companies?

The Irish Academy of Engineering has estimated that the rapid expansion of data centres we’re seeing will require €9 billion in new energy infrastructure, adding an extra 1.5 million tonnes to our carbon emissions by the end of the decade.

Being sustainable is not about creating more energy to use more. Allowing this free-for-all on the construction of data centres is regressive, myopic and an exploitation of our nation’s water and electricity. Equating data to some kind of natural resource that we’ve suddenly discovered in them there hills is ridiculous. Ireland is not mining data. Data, in this form, is mining Ireland.