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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk. With Aviva Insurance. We begin with the news that data centres here are using the same amount of energy as all of our urban homes combined. A UN report has cited Ireland as a cautionary tale on the environmental impact of data centres. Well, Caroline O'Doherty is climate and science correspondent with the Irish Times and she has the story.
And we're also joined by Rosie Leonard, data centre campaign lead at Friends of the Earth Ireland. Caroline, I'll come to you first. Thank you for being with us on the programme this morning.
Chapter 2: What energy demands do data centres in Ireland have?
I suppose it is frightening for some listening today to have Ireland cited in this report as an example of how not to handle data centres. What does this report say?
Yes, Clare, it says what we've known here in Ireland is about the extraordinary electricity demands of data centres. But when you kind of see it in this international report and where, if you like, top of the class for being bottom of the class of what not to do, it does put a kind of a new light on it. 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.
Chapter 3: How has Ireland been cited as a cautionary tale regarding data centres?
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.
What's happened is we have said to data centres, come on in, you're welcome, but our infrastructure hasn't kept up to meet the demand or we're at risk, certainly, of there being a gap here. Now, isn't it the case, though, that the data centres will be required to secure their own energy needs or up to 80% of them anyway?
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. The idea was that they would be told you have to produce 80% of, you have to produce your own electricity.
So you can't be dragging from what we're generating.
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Chapter 4: What are the environmental impacts of data centres in Ireland?
You have to generate electricity. How do you generate electricity? You generate it by gas generators or by wind or by solar. They're being told that they'll have to provide their electricity, 80% of it through wind or solar renewables. They've been given a six-year lead-in time for that. So in the meantime, they can bang up a gas generator and burn gas away.
And the CO2 that comes from that, when we're talking greenhouse gas emissions, that doesn't disappear after six years. That's there forever. And then as they go on, You'll still have that kind of 20 percent. They can still rely on fossil fuels. And 20 percent of something very large is very large. So this is an ongoing issue.
You know, I mean, it's fine to say to them that you have to provide 80 percent of your own energy through wind or solar. But we know that the problems that have been experienced in trying to ramp up the generation of wind energy in particular in this country when it comes to planning.
Yeah, and it's not, I mean, these will be mainly down the line, offshore wind hopefully will provide so much electricity that there'll be no fights. In the meantime, we have an awful lot of onshore wind farms and we're going to need quite a lot more. And we also, a lot of the ones that are there sort of 25, 30 years are coming to end of life and they're going to have to be repowered.
So there's a lot of work to be done on onshore wind at the minute and also solar. And what's happening is it's beginning to be like, There's been a generally good acceptance among communities for wind farms. They may not always like the fact that they're there, but there's an acceptance where we need clean energy. And solar farms now are certainly expanding a lot faster than maybe anticipated.
There is, you can sense and you can see it, sort of a groundswell of objections rising in communities saying, hey, hang on a second, we have enough of these renewable energy. And by the way, do we understand this correctly, that really and truly this particular wind farm is actually being sponsored by a data centre because they're going to need to supply energy.
so much of their energy from renewables. So you'll have the data centres concentrated in urban areas. And at the moment, it's partly all Dublin and Meath, but a wind farm in Tipperary. And that's how the balance will be. The data centre will be able to say, we are meeting 80% of our needs on a wind farm. It's not coming directly to us, but it's feeding into the electricity network.
So that's acceptable. But it's a community in Tipperary that's going to be looking at the wind farm. That's a tricky one because, you know, it takes a lot to sort of sell the idea of getting wind, you know, of getting renewable energy infrastructure into communities. And the last thing you need is for them to believe, well, it's not for us anyway. It's for a data centre somewhere else.
And the data centre industry would say that they are job creators. Now, there are those who would say once it's built, you really don't need many people working there to run it. But the estimate is that it is over 90,000 jobs that are underpinned by data centres in Ireland. Is that right?
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Chapter 5: How much electricity do data centres consume in Ireland?
And just to kind of echo something that Caroline mentioned, which I thought was quite striking, there is an issue around trust and public faith here in terms of data centres. And I think that the public has been asked to take quite a big hit on our energy system, on our bills because of data centre expansion. But there's a huge lack of transparency around the industry that we get in return.
And that's a really major issue. Like only one in six data centres in Ireland even submit a data to us. European Energy Efficiency Directive which is something that they have to do every year to kind of give data on very basic environmental requirements and that's one of the worst rates in Europe.
Can I just bring you back to what you said there and you mentioned bills and people will be wondering does this have an impact on how much I'm paying for my domestic electricity use?
Absolutely it does and just last week we actually published a report on this authored by Dr Sean Fearon and in that he shows that yes households in Ireland have paid a significant amount of extra additional costs on their electricity bills due to the impact that data centres have on wholesale prices. So over the last 10 years,
cumulatively Irish households paid over €750 million extra on their bills due to data centres. And that figure, if we look forward to the next 10 years, that's set to rise up to €1.6 billion. So, you know, data centres are having an impact on living in Ireland and on bills.
Caroline has said to us that in time offshore wind will sort this, that there will be no fights about energy and who's using what when we get to the point that we're supplying so much from offshore wind that we have enough for everybody.
And the crucial line there is in time. You know, the reality now in Ireland is we don't have this offshore wind, but we do have this massive data centre demand. So realistically, at the moment in Ireland, it's very clear, and this UN University report echoes this, Ireland is very much an outlier globally.
And what we've been calling for is a meritorium on new data centre connections so that we can press pause on this industry, which is gobbling up a huge amount of natural resources, water, energy, electricity, so that we can roll out renewables in a way that ordinary workers and households in Ireland actually benefit and see the results and see more affordable electricity bills.
Caroline, just on that, are we a global outlier when it comes to the number of data centres and the energy consumption ratio in Ireland?
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