Noteworthy analysis reveals onsite carbon emissions are over 35 times higher within the space of a decade.
Tim Hannon of Futureproof Clare, a climate conscious NGO that, along with several other environmental and social justice groups, is challenging Ireland’s rapidly expanding data centre industry and its growing carbon footprint.
Futureproof Clare Tim Hannon is concerned with the climate impact of Ireland's data centre industry Futureproof Clare We also sent dozens of Freedom of Information requests and examined State reports spanning a decade to chart when authorities became aware of the increasing power needs of the sector, and how they responded. We can now reveal:‘The Goldilocks zone’ From punch cards to floppy disk to CD-ROM, and now the cloud – Ireland has paid witness to all of the major data storage evolutions in the tech sector.
Another vital ingredient – a “safe, secure, reliable power system” – is also needed, EirGrid said. At the time, surplus capacity was predicted to be available for the next decade to meet energy needs. Much of Ireland’s current energy woes stem from these capacity shortages as more frequent breakdowns in an ageing power plant fleet and failure to build out new stations come up against growing energy demand.
Between 2018 and 2021, annual increases in energy demand were equivalent to adding 140,000 households to the power system each year, and the sector’s needs continue to grow. EirGrid’s latest projections show data centres and other large energy users are expected to account for over a quarter of electricity use by 2031.
Alongside the emissions from electricity coming from the grid, there are also emissions from on-site power generation at data centre facilities that O’Leidhin and other climate activists fear will grow as the State looks to curtail data centre use of the grid. A Noteworthy analysis of emissions data shows an increase just under 1,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions in 2012 to over 35,000 tonnes in 2021. This is mainly down to one data centre that has gas generation on-site and accounted for the vast majority of the Irish data centre emissions on the EU ETS system last year.
We contacted Microsoft for comment. It did not reply to the specific questions posed but instead pointed us toward online material on agreements with wind farms, use of battery storage, and plans to reduce water use. While to date, operators have rarely had to use their back-up generation, Brodie said that this is now “a very real possibility” with energy shortages coming up this winter.
CII pointed, for example, to research it commissioned from Baringa consultants this year that, it said, points to data centres as “critical enablers of decarbonisation”. The industry, backed-up by Wind Energy Ireland, is keen to stress that it is now providing an alternative route-to-market for renewable energy through Corporate Power Purchase Agreements that will help to decarbonise the Irish electricity sector.
Maria Delaney / Noteworthy The use of coal-fired Moneypoint is increasing the State's emissions Maria Delaney / Noteworthy / NoteworthyA new government position on the industry also highlights the “undesirability” for data centres to have direct gas connections. Growth in this area, the policy states, “could result in [the] security of supply risk being transferred from electricity to gas supply”.
According to records released to our team, as of mid-September 2022, there were 14 data centres contracted to GNI, with an additional 12 formal enquiries and eight informal enquiries on the cards. In GNI’s network development plan for 2016, for example, it said that it was developing a combined offering of natural gas, renewable gas and combined heat and power “as the primary source of energy for the data centre sector”.
Records released under FOI show that there are ongoing discussions between the CRU, the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications and GNI as to the legal basis to disallow issuing new connection offers to data centres. The industry has also questioned the general shift in direction from the regulator and the State to curtail electricity grid connections as the power demands of the sector were known for years.
That year, in its Generation and Capacity Statement, it outlined ”significant expansion” of the sector. The overall tone, however, was positive, highlighting the “favourable conditions” Ireland offered as a location. This “step change” in industry interest continued into 2015, with EirGrid pointing to “applications and queries for an unprecedented increase in large scale demand”. Connecting all these data centres, it said, had the potential to almost double Dublin’s electricity load built up over 90 years.
Some of these proposed measures made their way into a new connection offer process by EirGrid in June 2019, that was updated a year later. It set out flexible demand options in constrained areas like Dublin whereby electrical load must be reduced on instruction when power capacity may not be readily available.
The CRU told us that successive EirGrid Generation Capacity Statements since 2014 indicated that, while overall electricity demand growth and data centre connections were likely to increase, “it remained within acceptable parameters and reported a generation surplus”. “The overriding message you see from the government is that ‘this is a blip but give it 10 years, and we’ll have all of this offshore wind, and we can be the data centre capital of the world’.”UCC energy expert Paul Deane would agree. He said that it’s important to remember the growth of data centres “wasn’t something that happened organically or accidentally”.
Problem not going away Despite the recent changes in the State’s position, the energy needs of the sector are not going away anytime soon, with many planned data centre facilities already in the pipeline prior to the policy shift. This may compound the need to keep power stations fuelled by the dirtiest of fuels operating, increasing emissions further. It may also necessitate the widespread use of back-up generators at data centres.
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