Government shies away from ‘Icelandic solution’ to data centre sustainability
“The department has nothing further to add.”
Let me guess, the first question you’re asking yourself is “which department?” The answer? The Department of Enterprise, Trade & Employment.
The obvious next question is: “Add to what?”.
Well, let’s start with what the department was happy to comment on – and at some length: data centres in Ireland. Everybody knows that Ireland has a large data centre sector, much larger, proportionately, than many, possibly all, countries. Those data centres are an important consideration in terms of electricity demand given they are expected to account for close to 30% of all electricity on the grid by 2030.
Concerns over the impact of that demand on the country’s energy grid over the next few years have been mounting, prompting the government to publish a revised Statement on the Role of Data Centres in Ireland’s Enterprise Strategy earlier this year.
According to the Department, “the revised statement adopts a set of principles to harness the economic and societal benefits that data centres bring, facilitating sustainable data centre development that adheres to our energy and enterprise policy objectives”.
In recent weeks, we have seen the first results of this approach with Microsoft entering into renewable energy contracts for the development of 900MW of onshore wind and solar energy projects across Ireland to cover all of its data centre electricity load with renewable energy by 2025. This was achieved through what is known as a ‘corporate power purchase agreement’ (CPPA).
The Department describes initiatives like these as “very welcome news and will help to ensure that data centres in Ireland play a more positive role in bringing new green power to the electricity grid and driving Ireland’s renewable energy transition”.
In addition, the Department of the Environment, Climate & Communications (DECC) has finalised the terms and conditions for the first auction to supply electricity from offshore wind under the Renewable Electricity Support Scheme (RESS).
According to the Department of Enterprise, Trade & Employment, the government’s “clear preference is for sustainable data centre development that uses renewable energy, and which requires data centre developers to co-deliver renewable energy infrastructure, through CPPAs or decarbonised on-site generation”.
We can all agree that’s a laudable ambition. It may well be possible too. But the question is whether it can be achieved in the timescale required for Ireland to protect the integrity of its energy supply and meet its carbon emission reduction targets.
Clearly, if it was possible to alleviate the burden by handing some of those energy and carbon commitments over to another entity, that would be beneficial, especially if could be done in a shorter timeframe.
Which brings us to Iceland and the IRIS subsea cable linking it to Ireland that is due to open in early 2023. Judging by the responses from the Department of Enterprise, Trade & Employment, it appears determined to frame the potential of the cable purely in terms of telecommunications. “The cable is a welcome addition to our valuable strategic telecommunications infrastructure which provides significant new connectivity in the region and will help to build significant additional communications redundancy,” it states.
But there is a lot more to it than that. Gisli Kr, COO at Icelandic data centre operator atNorth, believes that IRIS makes it feasible to host almost any application in Iceland. “Latency is not an excuse anymore,” he says, arguing the IRIS cable “can resolve or at least help mitigate a lot of pain points the data centre industry in UK and Ireland is feeling today”.
Using figures taken from the grid, atNorth claims companies using data centres in Iceland can achieve 20% in energy savings and a decrease of 97.4% in carbon emissions compared to data centres in Ireland.
Halldór Már Sæmundsson, CCO at Borealis Data Center, argues that with data centre demand in Ireland unlikely to reduce, Iceland could be “part of the overall solution, in particular how to deal with high density compute and data storage at scale. For example, some high-density workloads might be offloaded to Iceland to make way for workloads that demand a closer proximity”.
The company is planning to take this proposition to market via current and potential customers and actively discuss potential cooperation with data centres in Ireland over, for example, moving high density HPC workloads to Iceland. An Irish data centre operator would keep the customer but offer the option to host some workloads in Iceland, freeing it up to better use its space and energy in Ireland.
“This could enable both to grow and the party that has built up the customer relationship to keep it and develop it,” Sæmundsson says. “We would be happy to discuss partnership with data centres in Ireland and our belief is that cooperating with us in Iceland only improves the strong Irish data centre proposition.”
He has previously described this strategy as akin to making Iceland a digital suburb of Dublin.
Sharing the load
The potential arising from IRIS is for a near-instant shift to sustainable data centre operation by moving some workloads and applications, drastically reducing carbon emissions because Iceland’s energy is nearly all from renewable sources and benefiting from a corresponding decrease in the energy burden on Ireland’s grid.
The potential environmental and energy benefits do not appear to be something the Department is willing to engage with, however. Asked specifically about this issue, it replied: “The department has nothing further to add.”
The government is not alone in its refusal to acknowledge the potential of IRIS. The only representative of a political party who provided a proper e-mail response on the subject of IRIS was Brid Smith TD, People Before Profit’s spokesperson on climate. And it was notable that she was unaware of the capability of IRIS to ease the energy and climate burdens of the data centre industry in Ireland.
“We were aware of the cable but hadn’t connected this to the data centre issue,” she wrote. “While it merits more consideration, we also think there is a bigger issue around the continued proliferation of such centres generally and what they do.”
Through his parliamentary assistant, the Green Party spokesman for Transport, Climate Action & Environment Brian Leddin said it was an angle he would “discuss further with his colleagues”.
For its part, Host In Ireland which has more than 50 partners across the digital infrastructure ecosystem and works “to increase awareness for how and why digital infrastructure coming from Ireland – with global and Irish companies – plays a unique role around the world”, appears disinterested in IRIS.
Attempts to ascertain whether there had been any contact with representatives from Iceland’s data centre industry concerning IRIS and/or discussions about what it could do for Ireland’s data centre industry have gone unacknowledged.
E-mails asking if there were any plans to examine how, or if, IRIS could ease the burden on Ireland’s power and energy requirements over the next few years and if it might be a viable option going forward went unanswered.
The response – or lack of it – from government and industry gives the impression that they find it awkward and inconvenient that Iceland and IRIS could provide a partial (but fast) remedy to some of Ireland’s data centre energy and carbon emission challenges.
It’s worth reiterating the obvious because it can be lost sometimes: rising energy demands and increased carbon emissions from the growth in data centres numbers in Ireland affect the country as a whole. If the one thing we know is that government and industry are keen to add further to data centre numbers in Ireland, is the rest of Ireland really only entitled to “nothing further to add” in response to an opportunity to mitigate the effects of that data centre policy, reduce the burden on the energy grid and help keep carbon emissions in check?
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