Data centres could be using 30 per cent of Ireland’s energy supply within the next 10 years, according to an environmental organisation.
Oisín Coghlan, chief executive of Friends of the Earth Ireland, made the claim after the decision of Fingal County Council to approve planning permission for three new Amazon Web Services data centres which will use 73 megawatts (MW) of power.
Speaking to RTÉ's Morning Ireland, Mr Coghlan said the energy usage of the data centres was comparable to the 84 MW generated by the new Mountlucas wind farm in Co Westmeath.
He pointed out that plans to bring the oil-fired Tarbert power station back online this winter would generate 150 MW. “So half of Tarbert will be dedicated to keeping these data centres going rather than keeping our lights going,” he said.
Mr Coughlan said opponents were not saying there should not be any data centres at all, there was just concern that Ireland was already heading towards 10 times the European average, even before the recent approval.
“Of course we’re going to have data centres, we just don't need to have every data centre that's going in Europe. The other country that has anything like ours is Singapore – 14 per cent. We're heading to 30 per cent. It's already more than all the urban homes in Ireland, twice as many as all the rural homes in Ireland. That's the power the data centres are using now and we're heading to double that in the next 10 years.”
Friends of the Earth submitted an observation to the planning application for the three data centres that this would "lock us into our dependency" on fossil fuels. “It's a triple threat. It's a threat to our energy security, the security of our power system, a threat to our pollution limits. And to be honest, it's a threat to the credibility of this government on climate.”
The Government had announced a moratorium on data centres around Dublin because of the risk to the power grid, he said.
“And here we are. This is driving a coach and horses through that if this is allowed to go ahead. And the reason it might be able to go ahead is because they already have a grid connection at the site for an existing data centre.”
If the three new data centres go ahead it will drive up demand for gas and fossil fuels, Mr Coghlan said. “Because even if they say they're going to use renewables, it means that there's less renewables for the rest of us. So the rest of us have to use gas or coal from Moneypoint to keep the lights on.”
