Power Grab - Ireland's energy story from electrification to Big Tech

Video highlights from our data centre walking tour

On a sunny Saturday in May, we walked around parts of Dublin City with stops and speakers painting the story of Ireland’s Data Centre expansion and its implications for our energy, water, climate targets and cost of living.

Alongside our Data Centre Campaign team, we were joined by external speakers Vicky Donnelly, Dr. Patrick Brodie and Sinéad Mercier to examine the power and politics behind Ireland’s data centre crisis.

What is all the data for? Who is involved? What does this mean for water, resources and energy at home in Ireland and abroad? And how did Ireland become such a dumping ground for data?

Here we follow the trail of discovery across town, examining the players, resources and how they are all connected to the risky growing expansion of power-guzzling data centres.

ESB Headquarters

Sinéad Mercier, researcher with European Research Council

"The ESB, set up in 1927 under the ESB's Electricity Supply Board act, was very much about this kind of idea of using electricity and using technology not for profit, but for the new values. Values such as bringing electricity to the public in a cheap and affordable manner and also subsidising rural electrification by ensuring that urban customers paid far more on their electricity bills in order to bring light and education to the rest of the country". 

 

Fine Gael party offices

Vicky Donnelly, Financial Justice Ireland

"For something that is constantly described as strategically essential, you know, of crucial strategic importance. There is no strategy for data centres in Ireland, there is no plan. There is no one government arm that oversees all of this and regulates it or plans it in any significant way. So for something so crucial, it's really lacking any significant planning on that. What we do have is significant planning about tax. And Ireland has positioned itself for decades now, since the 80s, and that's with all party support … as a tax haven, as a facilitator of tax avoidance for multinational corporations". 

 

Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications (DECC)

Rosi Leonard, Data Centre campaigner with Friends of the Earth Ireland

"A lot of the policy around data centres is getting written not in this building, even though of the profound environmental impacts that data centres have. It's more likely that it's getting written in the Department of Enterprise. And we've seen this happen time and time again. And in fact, the current data centre policy mostly rests on what's in the Department of Enterprise own data centre strategy. So the tech companies … have deliberately tried to move themselves into the area of enterprise rather than see themselves in terms of existing within ecological and environmental limits".

Google Campus in Dublin’s Docklands

Dr. Patrick Brodie, Asst. Prof. UCD

"We all know by this stage the statistics in the 60 plus hyperscale data centers surrounding Dublin primarily? You know, this is the total number, but these companies utilize about a fifth of Ireland's electricity. That number is higher in Dublin and Meath, where the localized percentages are apparently according to recent reporting, closer to 50%. These are astonishing numbers".

 

River Dodder at Ringsend

Kevin O'Farrell, Communications Support Officer with Friends of the Earth Ireland

"A single data centre can use between 500,000 and 5 million liters of water per day. That's a lot of water. It's the size of a small town. If you put that in context, the average household In Ireland uses 125,000 liters per year. So if you look at a data centre compared to a household, it would take a household maybe 40 years of its annual amount of water usage to catch up with a data centre [one day’s use]".

ESB’s temporary emergency power station at North Wall

Seán McLoughlin, Climate Policy Campaigner with Friends of the Earth Ireland

"There's lots of ways that you're being impacted directly right now, not just in terms of the climate down the line [but] on your electricity bills by data centers. I think at the core of what we talked about a lot is about power. It's about how these companies can hold power over politicians, over the economy. I think what that ESB station over there represents is how these companies are able to use their political power, their economic power, to manifest fossil fuel power. Fossil fuel power, electrical power in the real world. It's right over there".

Data centres soak up 21% of our electricity grid. This is more than all urban homes in Ireland - and predicted to grow to 30%. The EU average is 2%. Meanwhile energy prices in Ireland are one of the highest in Europe. 

The Irish Government has put private Big Tech companies ahead of public good. Data centre expansion is increasing energy bills for householders, causing energy demand to soar as well as increasing burning of fossil fuels - pumping out more and more emissions while everyone else does their fair share to lower theirs.

 

Learn more about our Data Centre campaign here, keep up to date on future events and what actions you can take.