Caroline O'Doherty

speaker

169 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 10 Jul

Caroline O'Doherty’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Claire Byrne Show · Ireland is a ‘cautionary tale’ on data centres · 4 Jun 2026 podcast

This report, it makes the point that, you know, look, data centres are with us.

AI is expanding massively and they call it data centres are the physical infrastructure for artificial intelligence.

And if you're going to accommodate that

In any country, you have to look at the environmental impacts.

And one of the environmental impacts comes from the energy use, which is electricity in Ireland's case.

At the moment, the data centres that we have are using more than a fifth of all the electricity generated in the country.

All the extra data centres that have permission to connect to the electricity grid when they get going,

they'll be then taking up about a third or more of all the electricity in the country.

And then we have a whole load of new data centres that want to be built.

We have data centre backers who want to develop them.

So we have this issue because the electricity supply hasn't been keeping up.

We're trying to decarbonise the electricity system here.

So we're trying to switch over from mainly burning gas to generate electricity, some oil too in emergencies, if you like.

And we have renewables, we have wind and we have solar.

But we're kind of stuck at this kind of wind and solar can't, if you like, we want to get that to at least 80% of all our electricity generation and then get it to 100%.

In a relatively short space of time, we want to make those leaps.

But if the electricity demand keeps growing, which is by data centres, it's very hard to make that change when you're also just trying to keep up with electricity demand.

So that's one of the issues they're raising.

So there's this new policy that was brought out at the end of last year.

So setting aside the ones that are currently operating and setting aside the ones that have grid connection agreements, the new tranche of them, if you like, they're kind of waiting in the wings.

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