A chorus of disapproval for data centres
Well, here we are at that time of year again. The decorations are all up, the trees are festooned with lights and the shops are full of shop assistants driven to the depths of despair by an endlessly repeating playlist of Christmas hits – try telling them it’s the season of peace and goodwill to all.
Many of us will be contemplating what presents we’d like for Christmas this year. Those of us who read the news reports on recent research produced for Friends of the Earth Ireland by energy analyst Prof Hannah Daly of UCC, might be tempted to sing All I want for Christmas is… a sustainable data centre policy that doesn’t end up imperilling the country’s ability to meet its climate targets.
I admit we might have trouble making it scan, but I’m sure we could work something out.
To recap, the research found that the growth in data centres in Ireland is making it almost impossible for the country to meet its target of cutting emissions by 51% by 2030. As the report notes, electricity demand in Ireland would have been relatively stable without data centres. Instead, demand in Ireland in the 10 years between 2012 and 2022 grew by just under 25%, the second-fastest rate in the EU.
The report also highlighted the rise of artificial intelligence in driving a new boom in electricity demand and growth. Prof Daly said that the current trajectory of data centre demand “is incompatible with Ireland’s climate goals. Data centres are growing far faster than the renewable energy procured to meet their needs”.
This is an interesting point because the report also claims that all additional wind energy generation in Ireland between 2017 and 2023 was absorbed by data centres.
Does that matter? It should matter to you and me. It should matter a lot. What it boils down to is that all the benefits that might be available to ordinary people from the country’s efforts to add renewable energy to the overall energy mix are being undermined by data centres which are gorging it all before it gets to us.
Without data centres, all the additional wind energy generated in Ireland in that time period would have fed through to you and me, with a correspondingly higher level of renewable energy in the overall energy mix. Would our bills have been cheaper? Would Ireland’s energy security have been stronger in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
There’s a financial cost to be met as well. As noted by the Irish Times, the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council has warned that failure to meet the emissions reduction targets in the Government’s climate plan could lead to the EU imposing compliance fines of €20 billion in 2030. Are data centres worth €20 billion to you? Guess where the money for the fines will come from?
Newstalk quoted Mike Beary, chair of the UCD Governing Authority, speaking in defence of the proliferation of data centres in Ireland. “I think the important thing to keep in mind in terms of data centres is that they’re not an industry – they’re an essential enabler to society and the entire economy,” he said. “If we send a signal that we don’t want them anymore, industry will go elsewhere and data centres will be built elsewhere.”
All of which may be true but does it matter where they are located?
Beary argued that data centres “empower every aspect of our lives today” with so much of what we do “powered by data centres and the infrastructure of the cloud”. Again, that may be true, but does it matter?
Let’s consider what would happen if data centres were built somewhere else. Very little, I suspect. If anyone is seriously suggesting having fewer data centres in Ireland would leave our society and entire economy less enabled, they might want to explain why much larger countries are willing to let their societies and economies be “less enabled” by having proportionally fewer data centres than Ireland to service their population. Is anyone seriously arguing Ireland needs to have more data centres than countries with populations much larger? Why, exactly?
The simple fact is that data centres in Ireland need to be accessible by businesses and populations in other countries, otherwise there would be no economic rationale for locating them here. Which means that data centres can be located anywhere and still “empower every aspect of our lives today”.
If a moratorium was imposed on building data centres here and more of them were located in other countries, our lives in Ireland would be “empowered” by the renewable energy they are currently absorbing (and will absorb in the future) and by the possibility that our country might actually hit its emissions targets.
I sincerely hope that, five or six years from now, we’re not singing All I want for Christmas is to not have to pay a €20 billion fine to the EU because my government’s data centre policy wrecked the country’s ability to meet its climate targets.
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