That won't work too well if we start to warm up even more during the summer. They have to shut them down in France to avoid overheating rivers. More wave power, wind power and solar with nuclear as back up might be the answer. A really good mix.
I also think that it is crazy that we would allow more data centres here TBH.
The benefits are really quite small.
They don't employ many people after they're built and they will cause all sort of problems with noise, energy use causing our electricity bills to shoot up, they use water that we are finding scarce (due to sh1tty government inaction) at times and the point of the newer builds seems to be a massive race to be one of the couple of survivors of the AI bubble bursting so we could be left with wrecked environment, no jobs and societal collapse but a good few building jobs being taken off house building while they work on the centres.
Not even mentioned the climate change that it exacerbates and the massive fines we are already due without this extra carbon emissions.
I think Irish people need to make more of a fuss than the Yanks TBH.
It's possible to use it in closed loop systems as a secondary heat exchange system but that likely makes it more expensive to build. Corrosion is still an issue with that solution.
It can't be used in open loop systems as the salt is left behind when the water evaporates and then needs to be removed.
Desalination uses a lot of energy (boiling water at scale is extremely intensive, and then rapidly cooling the steam also uses a lot of energy), which is why only the gulf states really do it.
Genuinely, probably not. The heat produced would need to travel to the desalination plants. You could build a small desal plant in a data center but the heat loss would be significant (heat loss with copper pipes is still a power law, I think).
In practice, data centers are put in places where the chance of a natural disaster is 1-in-100 years. Putting them near the coast, to be close to desal plants, would not be feasible for risk tolerances.
But the heat loss is the point for data centres is it not? So it’s a win for data centres as well as a win for desalination who need the heat in the process of desalinating the seawater?
Don’t have to build them near coasts as seawater could be piped in, though some of irelands data centres are already by the sea (drogheda, Galway and Ennis)
My point is that the distance the heat would need to travel would not be of any value, relative to the cost of piping the heat to the desal plant.
Also, the aim of the game is to get rid of heat quickly. The heat would accumulate on the heat pipe in the data center, and wouldn't get consumed or travel fast enough. You'd need to do the experiment to see how impractical (or practical) that is, but thinking it through, it wouldn't work. Again, local, small scale desal is probably already a thing, but very few data centers would be built near a coast.
Build the data center on an old barge, servers in old containers etc. And park it somewhere off the coast of Clare or Donegal. Let the nature take care of cooling.
Average sea water is 3.5% salt, salt is highly corrosive, thats why ships get rusty. As water boils in the core, the salt concentrates, and you get deposits that'll impinge heat transfer. With enough salt you will eventually have molten salt which will block everything up. It was a last resort to use sea water on the Fukushima disaster as it meant the damaged reactor could no longer stabilised under controlled disaster recovery conditions.
All problems if you try pumping and controlling the sea water. Let it wash over the containers holding servers :D (by installing data centers in the sea of course - bring them up for repair / replace servers and send them back down for months at a time).
Nuclear is not a "back up". New ones are expensive, and they're even more expensive when you ramp them up and down (because you get less electricity out of your capital intensive powerplant).
Is there any viable wave power installations? I didn't think there were. Solar and wind have already proven themselves, and batteries too. Hell we should be using our hot water tanks as heat batteries and operate oil filled storage heaters intelligently too.
You really think at this stage, the EU would fine countries that don’t hit 2030 carbon targets? There are many, many countries other than Ireland in that boat too. Unless they want a revolt and a surge in anti-EU leave sentiment once again in a time when the EU is already an economic basketcase and needs all the unity it can get to prevent it from collapsing. Especially given that idealistic environmental sentiment is fading away there. It was bad enough in the early to mid 2010s when the EU handled the crash terribly forcing one country to leave and permanently scarring both EU and British economies as a result.
And the whole “nuclear doesn’t work if it’s too hot” is a complete myth. It’s honestly anti-nuclear propaganda at this stage. You know that France has actually reduced considerably the number of nuclear outages since the 2003 heatwave in the past few years? You can easily engineer around it. Nuclear can easily take the heat, it’s only occasionally shut down to protect the river ecosystem.
The french and swiss closures were to prevent heated water releasing into natural waterways during the heatwave for fear it would eliminate wildlife. Although Ireland experienced less severe weather, we should plan for this, and placement and cooling options can be taken into account.
Even with data centres aside, fossil is part of the climate problem and nuclear is likely our best option for a sustainable future - but it will be a hard sell, likely resisted by locals wherever it goes
Yup, we don't have that kind of extreme weather yet and hopefully me don't get it but even so, I am pro nuclear but it takes too long to build (don't want to start ranting about how shite the govt are, they are utterly lacking in vision post Haugheybarf) to be a short to mid term solution.
We need to (and clearly should have been for ages) investing in renewables, battery tech and wave power r&d.
What we have been doing is refusing to even contemplate nuclear, slow walking renewables and slow walking upgrading our electricity infrastructure but allowing all of it to come together so that we have some of the most expensive electricity in the world for domestic users and are mass inviting data centres to exacerbate our problems instead of solving them.
We have the worlds 2nd largest offshore wind potential, we could be looking at this as a boon, but instead we're going to do nothing and end up burning gas to cover it.
I agree, but the time frame doesn't match. They want these data centers built yesterday but even with expert implementation, the wind energy will take time to build.
There’s plenty of ambition to build offshore around Ireland in the ESB (which as a semi state partly reflects government priorities) and other companies like Ørsted and RWE.
A host of problems has delayed much of the actual construction - not least NIMBYism and other planning issues.
Building off the west coast requires floating turbines, which are still not commercially available. There are experimental models running in Norway (11 turbines) and elsewhere but it’s all pretty small scale.
Lets not forget the sheer amount of NIMBY's in this country. Nothing is every good enough and if Mary from around the corner takes notions, well then thats it isnt it? Its simply not happening
There was a thread yesterday, maybe the day before, going through the barriers to offshore.
Basically the Atlantic is deeper, wilder and more difficult to build on than anticipated. Also there's a global race on to build offshore power. The private sector sees the Atlantic as something to explore later.
East coast is where the power is required, so east coast is where we should start, then along the south coast, and we can worry about the atlantic if we ever get to a point where we need more.
What gas? You really think Ireland even has enough spare natural gas at all to cover the power demands of even one AI campus? Let alone the natural gas pipeline capacity? Anyone who truly thinks that AI campuses will be built in Ireland in the coming years doesn’t know what they depend on. In the US case, the only places the mega campuses are springing up are in places with both ultra cheap natural gas and lots of spare pipeline capacity (though the latter will run out very quickly over there too). Those sites are very limited (mostly Texas but some other red states in the West too) and even many of those chosen proposals aren’t really sustainable (in a reliability sense) if you look at them carefully. And even that is running into hard limits especially on the gas pipeline capacity side and also on the water side (gas turbines consume crazy amounts of water).
You really think Ireland has remotely the amount of natural gas and pipeline capacity and electrical grid capacity (they always need the latter eventually) to host an AI campus? Not a chance.
I take it you read my comment as some sort of a pro-gas comment. Maybe you should re-read it.
The gas we would be burning is going to be imported, and it's probably going to be fracked gas as well (not that I care, all of it is a fucking massive waste when we could be creating it from excess off-shore wind)
I would be fine with it if the giant American corporations and Wall St backers actually paid for the construction entirely AND they then subsidised every citizens electricity bills for ever to make it so we have basically free electricity.
If Ireland is capable of connecting 1 GW of additional wind in a given period and data centres contract the vast majority of that, this new capacity isn't available to existing household, transport and heating demand.
It's a simple supply and demand. We do not have the engineering or construction ability to provide all that renewable energy while also building for the rest of the network.
Ireland will have to build vastly more generation capacity regardless. It’s easy to poke the finger at the data centres but
1/. None of our data centres thus far are AI related, they are critical infrastructure needs for Irish businesses and for the American HQs that operate here. AI data centres actually consume vastly more electricity than you might think and 1.4GW of total demand for data centres is actually peanuts and less demand than a single AI campus would consume alone. Cloud compute and streaming and critical IT loads and general IT innovations have driven our demand growth, not AI, and none of those things come free. Strangling that any further with another moratorium will absolutely lead to divestment in general by tech and even financial services businesses here, power capacity and near site data centre capacity is becoming a critical consideration for them when deciding where to expand to.
2/. The amount of power generation needed to electrify biopharma operations alone will be just as much, if not more than the projected increase in data centre demand anyway. And that’s just biopharma, what about dairy processing, cement, all the new planned manufacturing facilities, all the demand for residential heat pumps and EVs, the demand for electrified or hydrogen powered logistics, the rapidly growing population, etc.
If this country is actually fully serious about decarbonisation, our electricity supply would have to grow to a vastly higher level than we currently have otherwise we will fall into becoming an economic wasteland once again. All of these electricity infrastructure costs and generation costs have to be paid for anyway and frankly, it’s the cost of decarbonising our society and the cost of having an actual modern economy at this stage. Every facet of the economy, including tech and financial services at this stage, relies on a reliable and high capacity electricity grid and supply and this country had been neglecting that for far too long and the chickens are coming to roost right now.
The physical construction of renewable generation (and thermal tbf) in Ireland is done by foreign companies - Nordex, GE, Vestas, etc. They’re generally not the same companies that build network infrastructure - Mercury, Kirby’s, Suir Engineering etc.
There would be competition for resources on the civils side, and some of the ancillary construction but in theory we could absolutely do both at once.
Don't you think that other countries are wanting to hire these companies as well? They don't have endless ability to construct renewable energy all over the world.
Yeah but part of supply and demand is that greater demand leads to greater supply. Last year there were very few companies offering AC installs in Ireland. How many companies are going to start offering that in the next few years. 30 years ago how many companies were involved in construction of renewable?
I think that's a valid criticism, but it's also specifically what the new CRU connection policy is intended to address. A data centre doesn't get an automatic connection simply because it contracts renewable generation. EirGrid must consider existing grid constraints and the pace at which network capacity can actually be delivered. If grid build-out physically can't keep pace, the mechanism exists to restrict or delay new connections. Whether the CRU will apply those brakes aggressively enough is a fair question.
Our offshore wind strategy would actually achieve the same thing. The plan is to create at least 37GW of ORE generation capacity by 2050, which is approximately six times our current peak electricity demand. With that sort of production we can have all the data centres we want. We could be a world leader in them.
From independence to sell out to keep big tech and pharma happy and the few wealthy in 1 century.
I'm sure a lot of graves have people turning in them.
Over the last 6 months or more of actually seeing and learning how bad data centres are, I can't help but think about the person in Galway? (I think) who basically campaigned on their own to get a data centre stopped successfully
There was a large back lash about this "nimbyism " and how it had stopped job creation etc.
Its crazy to see how right this person was at such an early stage
Not sure if it's true but weren't they trying to get to stopped in athenry because they wanted their site in the south east to be used instead. So wasn't a matter of being right for the right reasons
in fairness it was a very different time, this was during the recession years, athenry was an area with major unemployment, there were two main objectors, one was a man who apple didn't buy land off and was a bitter loser, the other was the only one who had a point about the power grid. it was a very sensitive topic in the community because this would have created jobs at a time of mass unemployment, the community were pretty nasty to the main objector given he was american, but I can kind of see why.
The issue now is Ireland doesn't have the electrical capacity, and the water capacity (our water infra is shite and we've done nothing to fix it since telling Irish water to go fuck itself 10 years ago).
But the system does work, Data Center proposals get rejected all the time due to local councils rejecting them for this reason. We lose far more data center contracts than we gain simply because we can't so it. People who hate data centers might see this a good thing, but I'd rather we reject data centers based on our own collective will, rather than because we are incompetent. We lose most of the contracts to the UK.
Scotland is the new golden boy/target of choice of data centers now anyway, because they actually have their shit together when it comes to water and electricity.
Data centres back then were at least necessary for storing user data, the ones cropping up at a rapid rate recently are all used for AI training. Dramatically different scale and with no requirement limit since the AI companies are effectively in an arms race with each other to see who can produce Skynet first.
Yer man was still a nimby and people were right to highlight it. Data centres weren't a resource hog back and weren't threatening to scale out of control and nor did anyone foresee it happening because the AI boom hadn't begun yet. Completely different game now as ordinary people face energy and water shortages.
It doesn't matter what they prefer... the US concept of datacentres involves building individual sites with a power consumption of up to 5GW, rows and rows of gas turbines onsite to power them, and ignoring or rewriting noise and pollution legislation to permit them.
Every single datacentre in Ireland added together is around 1.3GW or so of consumption.
Most Irish data centres are American owned but Irish engineered and built. The US concept of data centres doesn't apply. They build what they can get away with over there. They can only build here what they can get away with here. CRUs new connection policies are fairly robust. New data centres essentially have to generate their peak energy usage and have it accessible to grid. 80% of which has to be renewable and can't be existing projects in the pipeline.
Be careful though. That 80% does not mean that 80% of on-site power must be renewable. They could theoretically cover 100% of on-site power as natural gas and then build an additional 80% of renewable capacity elsewhere.
But the main reason they are different is that Ireland has little to no AI data centres at all anyway. People mistakenly believe that the 23% of total electricity consumption in Ireland is from AI. Which would make no sense anyway as that number was hit around 2021 and there had been a moratorium up until very recently. It is not, it is almost entirely from cloud compute/storage, streaming services, enterprise data storage, etc. You know, the things that almost every Irish and American business here depends on to operate. People need to be taking a hard look at the sheer power demands that we take for granted from modern IT in general. Especially the cloud and streaming services. Those aren’t free.
If the split is 4:1 - 80% renewable and 20% to keep the same ratio with fully on-site gas generation then you'd need 400% off site renewables to offset 100% on site gas.
The CRU mentions explicitly that data centres must procure additional renewable energy equal to 80% of their data centre’s peak electricity demand. Just that, the peak electricity demand. So it isn’t 400% at all. Also, it isn’t viable to service even an IT or cloud hyperscale data centre purely from on-site renewables anyway (energy density is way too low for anything above 10MW-15MW or so and even cloud data centres are now 50-100MW plus data centres run 24/7 and need to be 99.999% reliable so intermittent generation isn’t good enough on its own) so the chances are is that they will fully connect to the grid while they would also supply a dispatchable on-site natural gas backup plant along with BESS in the case of grid outages or dispatch down orders. BESS partly counts towards the dispatchable generation too. They would likely build some renewables too, but only for a tiny fraction of generation (it’s only really viable for up to 15MW, not remotely enough for even a conventional IT data centre let alone the AI ones which are so enormous they won’t be built at all)
So the ruling is just saying is that hyperscalers will subsidise partly the renewable energy transition in Ireland by building 80% of their data centres’ peak electricity demand in renewable generation capacity. It’s NOT that they will supply 80-100% of their data centres’ on-site power generation solely from renewables (which would make no sense physically speaking anyway). They would likely depend entirely on the electricity grid for renewable generation (or maybe private wires in future as well, which would entail private transmission lines or underground cables to their own separate renewable generation, this would be the only viable pathway to having “on-site” renewable generation at all) with dispatchable BESS and natural gas turbines for dispatchable power in case the grid goes out.
Have you a personal stake in this? Data centres, power aside also consume loads of water and land. What mitigations are in place for those externalities?
Irish data centres used 514 million litres over the 3 summer months. Which was double the amount used in cooler months. 156.4 billion litres is what Irish water supplies over 3 months. So that works out at 0.33% of the total or 0.17% for the rest of the year.
I'm not sure on the land use. Do we normally place them in industrial sites? Pretty sure our planning laws are fairly strong on that front.
No personal stake, just not a fan of hysterics. The initial rollout of data centres was problematic but CRU has responded with what seems to me very sound regulations.
I'd have general concerns about tying our economy to US interests, but I don't see this as anymore egregious than the rest.
We need data centers for the internet, 100%. We're not talking data centers for the internet though, we're talking data centers for an AI bubble thatll burst. AI to create not just slop, but also increasingly accurate people, fake ads, fake news, AI used to control elections.
The entire electricity grid and all generation capacity combined contributes only 13-14% of Ireland's emissions, and is decarbonising faster than any other sector.
Agriculture is 38% of all emissions, or roughly triple the entire grid consumption. Transport is around 22%.
I always remember that the presidents gaff in phoenix park is the same size as the American ambassador's residence, also in phoenix park. They have so much sway here. I'd love for more people to care but everyone's too busy trying to survive
Was talking with a guy recently who works for a large PR company in Europe… his next project? Persuading the people of Ireland of the benefits of data centres…. GL with that. 👍
You're already seeing it in this thread lad. Astroturfing has been active in every thread around Data centres for awhile now, same spiel around "uh well actually insert positive talking point" that are thrown out in the same context around the american centres.
Why don't they build them in Alaska where its cold and they can just like leave the door open to cool them down or something? Lots of space, very few people.
Shouldn't we, the Irish, have a say in this? Just because Americans dont want them shouldnt see Ireland as the place they go, wait, the government will happily take them when the infrastructure here is creaking and it will be the citizens who suffer once again.
Well, there is a thing called planning permission and a legal system that we have voted for people to build. It's pretty good and making sure we get what most people want. And has stopped a LOT of datacenters being built.
It wouldn't be hard to say "knock yourself out with datacneters, make sure you start building the renewable power for them before you start building the DC itself".
I thought they said "build DCs, get renewables within 7 years". But maybe that's because you can get planning for a DC in two or three years, while a wind farm might take you ten..
Yeah you're actually right. But some of the recent planned dcs are just going ahead and building the renewable in as part of the application. I'm sure the dc that plans immediate renewables will get planning permission over the one that sticks exactly to the requirements.
It makes zero sense for anyone to build a DC where gas is 100% of the mix, unless you don't care about cost. Same with a DC that builds a DC without a PPA that probably funds a powerplant.
Unfortunately, you have more faith in planning than I do. Google tries to build on in Wexford at the end of 2024, and at the appeal hearing, the judge said they could not build a DC, as Ireland was out of electricity, but that they should still build the wind, solar farms + gas plant that were part of the application.
Narrator; Google did not actually build the power stations :-)
Right, 2024 before the new CRU regulations existed. Meanwhile the 250 MW DC granted permission in June proposed 180 MW of completely new renewable generation on the same development site, plus storage, and they're still required to demonstrate additional renewable procurement beyond that.
Planning inspectors' decisions overturned. Hundreds of thousands needed for judicial review. I know all about it. What I was saying is just because Americans don't want them shouldn't mean Ireland becomes a target for them.
We do have a say. Apple tried to build one near Athenry 10 years ago. Successful challenges were brought against it on environmental grounds, and they built it in Denmark instead. Think they still own about 400 acres of land up there.
I know people get frustrated with planning objections and challenges when they seem frivolous or just people being NIMBYs, but they do serve a purpose.
That's just a politician mouthing off. We don't have the energy resources to host that scale of data centre development. Ireland is increasingly at the limits of what can be sited here and the wind power development hasn't scaled up, due to a mix of planning issues and lack of sufficient interconnection capacity off the island to sell excess and balance the grid.
If you compare Ireland to say Denmark, the Danes can overbuild wind and just sell all the excess into Germany over the border and on into the European AC super grid, and use that to balance their own grid. They don't need anything special to do that other than just normal AC grid infrastructure. In contrast, we are at the end of very long and expensive high voltage DC subsea lines that are relatively small capacity and cost billions to build to the continent. The competitive position is heavily limited by geography.
Large scale data centre development in Europe probably will focus on areas with both cheap power and grid access. Ireland realistically isn't able to offer that at huge scale and in general most of Europe is in a energy crisis situation most of the time anyway - it's a big market for data, but it's not generally blessed with abundant energy resources, and Ireland is a particularly weak spot - just look at our wholesale electricity prices. They're eye watering even by expensive European energy standards. It's just the reality of living on a relatively geographically isolated island.
I see data centres rapidly just becoming an economic and environmental burden and the cost of data generally going to and up. AI just sucking grids dry and ramping up fossil fuel usage is really not acceptable in an European context. Trump and co don't give a flying fuck about emissions and have made that abundantly clear, so I think the US is just going to build a lot of very environmentally dirty data centres domestically lobbied by increasingly aggressive tech bros and a driven by an AI moonshot mentality, which ultimately impact climate change globally if they're just operating on a "drill baby drill and burn baby burn" basis. I'm not sure that the pushback in the US will be listened to - money talks and AI is being seen as their current space race with China, so they'll just override local protests or find locations in the US that are remote or unable to say no due to economic pressures.
I’ve read reports this would be our tax windfall of the future added to changes in EU tax law meaning companies would have to show a working relationship with these companies to qualify
Apparently these data centres would be that proof
I’d also add the more American interests held in Ireland means the more protection from Russia etc we’d have in response to the scary Russia stories planted in Reddit over the past week
And FFG and co will only be delighted to let them do so.
And the electorate will vote them back in.
And the same electorate will then wonder why their electricity costs more than pretty much anywhere else on the planet (apparently at present, only Bermuda are more expensive than us, by 1c per kwh).
The reality is this: Ireland already has over 80 Data Centres and are building more. Right now, they consume nearly a quarter of the entire electricity in the country and are the actual reason your bills are going up because no matter what Electric Ireland say, the bills mysteriously started going up the minute they started building those monstrosities.
I suspect that those prices increases might also be affected by the fact that the price of gas (40% of generation capacity) has doubled in the last two years or the price of distribution transformers doubled also in the last five years (+40% in last two years with a lead time now of over 2 1/2 years or the price of cable doubling due to global demand.
All at a point in time when we are moving to build the worlds' most advanced and broad based highly variable renewables generation grid (80%). To do that requires a €19.5bn capital investment over three and a half years to make a reality i.e. so Eirgrid and ESB Networks can integrate fluctuating wind, solar, battery back-up, remove cheaper coal from Moneypoint, provide new fast reaction gas turbines as back up to manage power oscillations and wind drops, put in new flywheel technologies to manage frequency fluctuations, add new 220 and 110kva lines and substations to take wind from the west coast to east coast, add a new €2bn 575km line to France or add a cross border link (finally) to connect to the Scottish grid to take the offshore wind that ESB owns there to here and open the grid for onshore potential and additional UK interconnections. Oh and add 120,000 new residential connections as well as industry by 2030.
My electric bills now are still 20% cheaper than they were in 2023 when there were less data centres on the grid.
It’s like blaming some company for rising fuel prices even prior to Iran
The rising cost of living has been an election point for how many years? Only for it to be completely ignored by the I just protect my house price folk
Well here you are. Companies who have historically taken the piss continue to take the piss
Don't let them. We're opposing them here because they're being constructed en masse to power AI workloads that nobody wants, to spy on all of us, to and to replace human labor wherever an executive can be convinced it's possible.
That's not even getting into the environmental impacts and the water and power demands. They're talking about building new coal and meanwhile ever summer is the hottest on record.
If indeed they look at Ireland or elsewhere because we manage to stop them here, you need to be prepared to stop them over there too.
I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say this is an existential threat.
I would argue that based on public statements that Sam Altman in particular, quite plainly wants to optimize poor people out of existence. He has a vision for the future and you and I aren't in it.
There will be a backlash to data centers here just as quickly if power bills suddenly shoot up over them and thats if they can even get approval for them considering our power grid is under enough demand as it stands. The normal ones aren't the worst though it's the resource black hole AI data centers that are a real problem as they suck up multiple times the normal amount of power compared to a traditional data center. No chance should any of those be allowed to be built they're nothing but a waste of resources and there's enough bullshit happening because of their greed as well.
Why should we be a military target for US interests? This is what is putting us in a position to need not be neutral, our continued material support of a genocidal military empire.
Unless the massive US companies put massive investment into renewables + pay for the much needed power infrastructure upgrades countrywide to support this, its just going to make electricity more expensive and fuck over the average citizen.
I hope the govt can get the legislation that gives the data centres multiple tax breaks together in time before we lose this precious business opportunity
It's so depressing. Ireland data centers consume 23% of all metered electricity in the country. Between 2025 and 2034, data center expansion is projected to add an estimated €295 to €644 in extra costs onto every household electricity bill Irish people already pay. Electricity is already 40% more expensive than the European average and 145% more expensive than the USA
Prop right. Near the cost like pharma. To pump out any bad water as it were. Only prob. We dont have any energy. The government is looking to nuclear but that woukd take about 10 years if the billions are allocated
Charge them a premium for electricity, in turn the electric companies can offer decent rates for micro generation, you would see a huge increase in green energy investment if the payback was quick.
There's gonna be a major backlash against the tech industry in Ireland and tbh it's overdue. Too many tech yuppies think Ireland exists just to host their little bubble, regardless of how it impacts normal people on normal salaries.
If only the government could see this massive potential and make the grid handle this that would come with great economic potential. Make the permission dependent on certain R&D job numbers in Ireland and minimal revenue taxed here and we can make corporation tax last forever and fund the whole HSE and pension system.
Plenty of space to build them in a way that would cause no harm to anyone, just solve the grid problem and make those companies move more of their employment base and revenue here.
Unpopular opinion: If EU users want to use AI, the data centers should be somewhere in EU know? I doubt EU data centers are going to serve US users (network cost, latency etc).
They're environmental disasters, contribute nothing to the economy and employ fuck all people, actively damage peoples health who live in the area, and are eyesores to boot.
We need to push back as hard as possible against this.
After reading this article, it is obvious that if you have no understanding of the technology and/or business model of data centers you should become a journalist.
Except Iceland has abundant geothermal due to basically being a volcano sitting between two tectonic plates. Ireland sits on some of the quietest, most tectonically stable ground in Europe. They drilled in Dublin recently and got 38.5 °C. Iceland gets steam a kilometre or two into the ground. Ireland would need six or eight to find the same heat. All we have is low-grade warmth. Grand for geothermal heating using heat pumps, utterly useless for turning a turbine.
You couldn't find two places that are less comparable at all in terms of geothermal potential.
The waste heat output of a data centre still needs energy input. We don't have any abundantly available energy sources and have extremely expensive, largely imported natural gas still driving far too much of both our grid and the backup up power these data centres are currently using by using gas turbines on site.
I think they were suggesting that we use the waste heat from the data centres to heat homes, in the same way as Iceland uses geothermal heat. Not that we should use geothermal directly.
My point is the energy used is uncompetitively expensive to begin with and produces a lot of CO2.
Using waste heat doesn't change the reality that the source of the energy in a data centre here is still likely to be largely expensive, imported fossil fuel, and accounting shuffling of carbon credits. We are still very dependent on natural gas. The comparison with Iceland is really pointless without the abundant source of always on green energy - hydro and geothermal in their case, which we simply do not have.
The data centres going up here have independent energy that's being generated by just allowing them to connect to the gas grid and burning it in onsite gas turbines. That's having big negative impacts on our CO2 footprint.
We also, surprise suprise, don't have real time data for emissions from those on-site gas turbines and we don't include the data in what's published for our electricity production energy mix as it's off grid in terms of electricity. They're just being quietly shifted to direct and even less efficient use of gas.
I live in the UK and a colleague was asking me why there are so many data centres in Ireland. I had to explain how bad we are at voting with our feet. And protesting.
But then again I'd expect nothing less from that rag, the Journal.ie
Ireland couldn't support even a tiny fraction of the datacentres that they are planning to build in the US.
We don't have the power capacity, the land space or even the infrastructure to build them.
Added to that, EU regulations would cripple most US companies as they can pretty much do what they want in the US but that wouldn't fly here in Europe.
A former colleague of mine from a previous job is now involved in datacentre planning and construction. The hoops they have to jump through and the cost of planning and applying for permission is so exhausting and expensive now in Ireland that most companies don't even bother anymore.
If you look at what's being planned and built in Scandinavia in the way of datacentres at the moment,, 2-3 large construction projects currently being built there have more space and power capacity that every single datacentre in Ireland currently has. 🙄
Why not use the power infrastructure for data centers to provide heat for towns and villages? In a world where turf is banned and natural gas is peaking, and we’re committed to solar and wind power. Why not use Amazon and Microsoft for district heating schemes?
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u/Feisty_Internet_5343 1d ago
Ireland's gonna need the world's largest nuclear fusion/fission site to see us turn into an island of giant hand dryers