Data centre growth poses threat to climate targets, says Friends of the Earth
Environmental group Friends of the Earth has called for an immediate moratorium on the expansion of data centres in Ireland to be included in any new Programme for Government.
Research it commissioned shows the extra electricity needed for the expansion of data centres over the past six years was equivalent to the growth in renewable energy from wind and solar farms.
The group said this poses a significant threat to Ireland’s climate commitments if left unchecked.
The report begins by stating that there is an absence of evidence to establish if the concentration of data centres in Ireland helps or hinders the country to stay within its legally binding carbon budgets.
It trawls through electricity consumption statistics to present what Friends of the Earth say is an alarming and stark picture about the increased use of fossil fuels by data centres.
The environmental organisation said the analysis points to “an injustice” in the State’s data centre policy, whereby renewable energy is being diverted to serve the growth of such centres, instead of reducing Ireland’s overall national fossil fuel use.
At the root of this is a coincidence.
Between 2017 and 2023 the amount of electricity used by data centres grew by the same overall amount as carbon-free renewable energy from wind and solar farms.
This means in effect one cancelled out the other.
So Ireland running fast in terms of adding renewable electricity but is standing still when it comes to the carbon intensity of electricity being used for normal everyday activities.
Or at least that is how it is presented in this report.
The report makes no reference to the 22% reduction in overall greenhouse emissions from electricity generation in Ireland last year, reported as a huge achievement by the Environmental Protection Agency.
That reduction was driven by a 12-fold increase in the importation of electricity from the UK, a trend that has continued into this year.
Web service operators have invested around €15 billion in data centres in Ireland.
Four companies – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Meta, and Google – account for €10bn of this investment.
Another nine companies account for the remaining €5 billion, including Echelon, Keppel DC Reit, and Vantage.
Today’s report highlights however, that these operations accounted for 21% of Ireland’s electricity consumption last year and says this figure is projected to rise significantly by 2030.
Since 2015 the demand for electricity by data centres has increased by an average of 22.6% each year.
This compares to a 0.4% increase for electricity demand in the rest of the economy.
UCC Professor in Sustainable Energy and Energy Systems Modelling Hannah Daly, who authored the report, said if these trends continue, by 2030 the electricity demand of data centres in Ireland could exceed that of Ireland’s entire industrial sector.
Without data centres, Prof Daly said Ireland’s electricity demand would have seen minimal growth over the past decade.
Instead, demand between 2012 and 2022 grew by 24.7%, the second-fastest rate in the EU, while electricity demand in the EU fell by 3.1%.
The report says these trends are contributing to a stagnation in Ireland’s progress toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions and meeting legally binding carbon budgets.
Without decisive action it says data centres will continue to divert renewable energy to serving demand growth rather than displacing fossil fuels.
It will also deepen reliance on fossil fuels and exacerbate Ireland’s carbon budget overshoot and energy security threats.
It says a comprehensive policy framework is urgently needed to ensure Ireland’s economic development and enterprise strategy are aligned with legally binding climate commitments.
Prof Daly said:
The current trajectory of data centre demand is incompatible with Ireland’s climate commitments. Data centres are growing far faster than the renewable energy procured to meet their needs.
“Moreover, data centres are connecting to the natural gas network to get around constraints in the power network. This is prolonging Ireland’s dependency on fossil fuels and will make legally binding carbon budgets unachievable.”
Rosi Leonard, Data Centre Campaigner with Friends of the Earth Ireland said:
Ireland has allowed itself to become a data dumping ground for corporations like Amazon and Meta.
“This is creating stark inequalities in our energy system whereby data centres are hoovering up the limited clean energy that is currently deployed. In the same regions of Ireland in which Meta bought the entire electricity output of solar farms for their data centres, over 60% of homes are reliant on oil and solid fuels such as peat or coal.”
The State’s policy of allowing unlimited data centre growth is like trying to fight climate breakdown and take fossil fuels out of homes with both hands tied behind our back.
“We need a moratorium on data centres in Ireland now before this problem gets any worse.”
Meanwhile, Jerry MacEvilly, Head of Policy in Friends of the Earth, said:
When it comes to Programme for Government negotiations, political parties must support a pause on connecting more data centres until the proposed policy framework in this expert research has been implemented and the threats data centres pose to climate and security have been removed.
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Data centre growth poses threat to climate targets, says Friends of the Earth, source
