The UN report that this week cited Ireland as a cautionary tale of how not to develop a data centre industry contained some fascinating nuggets of information.
For example, being polite in Artificial Intelligence (AI) communications can have a sizeable impact on electricity use.
“Getting rid of politeness by not saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ can reduce the overall footprint significantly,” it says.
“A concise response mode can reduce ChatGPT token output by 30 per cent, saving 87-98 GWh of electricity per year, equivalent to the annual residential electricity of nearly 760,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa.”
RM Block
The advice may seem a little cold in a world where AI is trying its best to appear human, but arguably, the politeness has already gone out of the data centre debate.
That debate has been raging since June 2021, when a senior manager in EirGrid wrote to the energy regulator, the Commission for Regulation of Utilities, expressing concern at the ever-growing electricity demand of data centres.
He was probably the first to put the problem in terms the public could understand, saying data centres each had, or were seeking to have, electricity usage that was the equivalent of a large town or small city such as Kilkenny.
“It surely must ... give rise to consideration and potentially wider national debate as to that which is in the public interest in this regard,” he wrote.
Five years on, the problem of how to accommodate the power-ravenous needs of data centres in an electricity system that is flat out trying to keep up remains unresolved.
As the UN report pointed out (as have many public bodies, academics, energy experts and environmental NGOs before it), the State’s 121 data centres consume one-fifth of all electricity in the State.
That is forecast to rise to more than 30 per cent in the next five years based on planned new data centres that have already been promised connection to the electricity grid.
Then there is the question of what to do about all the other data centres that tech companies have signalled they want to locate here.
The strain means insufficient electricity for other kinds of development in some areas and, as the Climate Change Advisory Council put it last week, that any additional renewable energy generated is being “cannibalised” by data centres instead of displacing fossil fuel generation.
Friends of the Earth also produced a study last week – disputed by the data centre industry – that said data centre electricity demand was increasing household electricity bills.
The environmental NGO is one of three granted leave to judicially review the State’s data centre energy policy – for those additional data centres signalled by investors – in a case scheduled for hearing in April next year.
What has been construed as an onslaught of negative publicity has led Taoiseach Micheál Martin to declare that data centres are being “demonised”.
Tánaiste Simon Harris says they are being treated as “bogeymen” and Minister for Enterprise Peter Burke this week implied near total economic wipeout should their further expansion be constrained.
Asked about the UN report on RTE’s Morning Ireland this week, Minister for Energy Darragh O’Brien insisted the Republic was the envy of Europe, if not the world, for being able to attract so much data centre investment, but his annoyance was audible and at odds with his usual ebullient persona.
The sector itself has felt so under fire that earlier this year it formed a new industry body/lobby group, the Irish Data Centre Supplier Alliance, even though there is already a very active industry body/lobby group, Digital Infrastructure Ireland.
Despite all of this, the sector shows no signs of giving up on this State as a preferred location.
The Republic’s appeal is threefold – corporation tax, climate and cables.
Corporation tax rates are relatively low and are the reason many multinationals are attracted here.
The relatively stable climate and low temperatures here mean data centres do not need huge volumes of water for cooling their giant servers – an extremely contentious issue in other countries.
As for transatlantic cables for internet traffic, most of them come through Irish waters, and many make landfall in Ireland.
Data centre developers have also been finding ways around the electricity supply issue.
The Pure Data Centres company was refused an electricity connection in Dublin because of the strain on supply there, so they created a “microgrid”, which makes them an “islanded” operation.
In other words, they’ve been using fossil gas and burning it on-site to generate their own electricity.
This week, they announced they had bought biomethane – renewable gas made from waste animal and plant material – from Germany, equivalent to the amount of fossil gas they use and had it injected into the gas pipeline that runs underwater from Scotland to Ireland.
The renewable gas may not directly go to their data centres but through a certification system that vouches for their purchase, they are allowed to declare their facility decarbonised.
Management made it clear, however, that they would prefer not to have to be involved in energy generation and still hoped to get a connection to the electricity grid in the future.
Also this week, in a sign that data centre operators are looking beyond the congested Dublin-Meath sites where almost all of the industry is located, Red Admiral Data Centres received planning permission for a facility at Rochfortbridge, Co Westmeath.
It will also run on fossil gas-fired electricity, but in combination with solar energy from an adjacent solar farm, it also received permission to develop as part of the project.
And in another development this week, the long-running planning battle by Art Data Centres to build a campus outside Ennis, Co Clare, came to an end when the High Court dismissed the latest challenge against it.
The developers have said their facility will also run off-grid or as an islanded operation, buying offsets from wind, solar and biogas suppliers.
Data centre companies often say their demand for offsets underpins the roll-out of renewables. Environmental, climate and energy experts often argue it sucks up all available renewables, making decarbonisation of the wider energy system harder.
Whether politely or impolitely expressed or not, the argument looks set to rage for some time yet.
