In Ireland, the national conversation surrounding data centres and their energy usage has shown little sign of abating. Yet recently it has changed in dynamic, with the Industrial Development Authority (IDA) expressing concern that data centres were being ‘scapegoated’ for the crisis in energy supply.
Critics of the industry, however, have continued to cite all too familiar statistics surrounding the growth of data centres in Ireland, and today there are 70 in operation, with 8 under construction, 5 in planning and a further 36 with planning approved.
These facilities are predicted to consume 11% of Ireland’s electricity supply and account for 1.85% of carbon emissions nationally.
The concern from local stakeholders is that with more data centres being connected to the national grid, particularly within the greater Dublin area, blackouts will affect other key consumers due to a constrained power supply.
These fears have been so widely expressed that it has led to an Oireachtas motion to implement a moratorium on new data centres, calling for stricter measures to be put in place.
Context, as ever, is crucial, and according to a blog from the International Energy Agency (IEA), forecasted electricity demands show that other users are consuming greater volumes of energy than data centres.
For example, by 2022 residential consumers are expected to use 9.5TWh, commercial consumers 9TWh, industrial organisations 8.6TWh with a further 7.5TWh for data centres and other large energy users (LEU) combined.
With regard to the carbon emissions of the industry, data centres emit an anticipated 1.85% of greenhouse gasses (GHG) in Ireland, compared to 37% for agriculture, 17% for transport, and 12% each for manufacturing/industry and residential.
An academic study also found that despite a 6-fold increase in the data being processed since 2010, data centre energy consumption globally had only risen by 6%.
Furthermore, IEA reports that although global data centre workloads will increase sharply, potentially tripling by 2020, further efficiency gains mean electricity demand may only rise by 3%.
These figures clearly illustrate that data centres are not excessive in demand, but are also far from profligate in consumption. Why, then, are data centres singled out for vilification in the energy debate?
Changing the perception
According to the IDA, the ICT industry, of which data centres are the beating heart, employs over 37,000 people and generates €35 billion in exports annually. Yet one of the key challenges is the failure to recognise their contribution to the economy and wider society.
One might argue that it is hard, even for the technology sector, to properly quantify the true value of data centres, but they are critical to all global economies and have been pivotal to the remote work and digital transformation efforts of the pandemic.
Within a traditional factory, it is easy to see the value: people go in and goods come out. Even within a service industry, a business has a premises, where people go in and services are provided.
It is all visible, and intuitive. Yet with data centres, the entire operation is disaggregated and digitised, and difficult to see the value.
A small, multi-tenant facility could be viewed like a modern business park, where the data centre provides hosting, power, connectivity, jobs and support services to enable small businesses to operate or trade online.
Whereas a large colocation or hyperscale facility will provide an on-ramp to the digital economy, directly enabling enterprise businesses via low latency connectivity, high levels of security, application resilience and capacity to scale or meet growing customer demands.
Driving innovation
With the broad drive toward greater digitisation of public services, Net Zero carbon targets and national development programmes for AI, Blockchain, and Quantum Computing, an advanced digital infrastructure is fundamental.
Here, Ireland is ahead of the curve with an infrastruc...
