Maybe it is just me, but I find people showing me their phone’s photos, capturing some cherished moment or other, extremely tedious. Blurry videos from gigs are even worse. In fact, the notion of going to see a band while filming with your phone seems to defeat the purpose of the concert in the first place.
However, lots of people want to hold on to the memories and document the fact that they were there. And if people want to save enormous amounts of data from videos, photos, memes and the like, we will need more data centres. More photos, more storage, more capacity, more data centres.
Simply put, we can’t live in a digital age without data centres. If you believe that we are not going back to analogue, and the digital age is both the present and the future, then the requirement for data centres will expand as exponentially as the desire to save photos on your phone.
Data centres are the backbone of the online world. Nothing functions without them. Consider the website where you might be reading this article. How do you think the data gets to you and where do you think it is stored? Data centres are indispensable for maintaining the IT systems of businesses across various sectors, including telecommunications, financial services and government operations, ensuring seamless functioning of everything from ecommerce to emergency services. Our world can’t function without them. The problem is they use lots of electricity.
You may know your computer has a storage facility called a hard drive. It also has a processor, some basic networking hardware allowing you to connect to the internet, a battery and a power supply to provide the energy for it. As the electricity passes through your laptop’s hardware, it produces heat which is cooled by a small fan. A data centre does the same thing but on a monumental scale. Instead of one hard drive, it hosts tens of thousands of hard drives – servers – which store, process and host vast quantities of data that produce incredible amounts of heat, requiring specialised cooling systems. A data centre needs to be kept at 18-27 degrees to preserve the hardware. It helps to be in a cool climate like Ireland.
Today, there are more than 8,000 data centres in the world, about 33 per cent in the US, 16 per cent in Europe and close to 10 per cent in China. Data centres have developed rapidly in Ireland, consuming enormous amounts of electricity. The State currently has about 82 centres; 14 are under construction and 40 more have been approved. In 2023 data centres accounted for about 21 per cent of all electricity generated in Ireland, a dramatic rise from just 5 per cent in 2015. This figure is expected to reach 27 per cent by 2028, meaning data centres could soon consume more power than all urban households combined.
Strategically, the question for the country is: should Ireland opt out of this global business or should we tool up to make data centres part of our future-proof industrial armoury?
This week, South Dublin County Council refused Google Ireland planning permission for a new data centre at Grange Castle Business Park, citing “the existing insufficient capacity in the electricity network [grid] and the lack of significant on-site renewable energy to power the data centre” as reasons for refusal.
Does this decision constitute an inflection point, signalling that Ireland is out of the data centre business because we admit that we don’t have the engineering ability to power this essential part of the global economy? Have we thrown in the towel, because once again we can’t get our act together when it comes to State capacity?
Environmentalists probably hope so, arguing that data centres will contribute to Ireland missing global warming targets. On the other hand, the digital economy itself is far less environmentally harmful than the older, more heavily polluting economy. Ecommerce uses far less energy than old commerce and ecommerce plus data centres are the future.
Because Ireland was out of the blocks early in building data centres, there is a significant amount of data centre construction and engineering expertise in this country. The Irish data centre market amounted to $3.32 billion (€3 billion) in investment in 2023, and is projected to increase to $4.22 billion by 2029. Data centres contribute significantly to Ireland’s GDP. In 2020 the industry added an estimated €1.3 billion directly to the economy. Amazon’s data centres alone have, the company claims, created an average of more than 10,000 jobs per year in local communities across the country, in the construction, connection, maintenance and operation of data centres.
Employment in data centres constitute high-value jobs involving a range of activities, including data analytics, customer experience services, technical support and software development. According to IDA Ireland, as of 2022, companies that operate data centres in Ireland employ about 16,000 direct employees. However, when contractor numbers are factored in, that number reaches 27,000.
Irish firms are also building data centres abroad. Because Ireland has such a relatively long history of building data centres, there are many specialist Irish firms that were set up for the domestic market and have since expanded abroad.
With so much on the line, there needs to be some sort of truce between those who argue that data centres are climate destroyers and if the world has to have them, better they be somewhere else, and those who value the expertise already established and don’t wish to see us lose great economic opportunity. We can virtue signal and export our data centres to some other country, patting ourselves on the back that we have offloaded an environmental dilemma as we continue to scroll incessantly. Or we can involve ourselves in a bit of “cathedral thinking” powering up our electricity grid, not for the demand today but for the likely demand tomorrow.
An interesting example has been set by Finland, which seems to have achieved the best of both worlds. Data centres create what is called heat waste which can be captured to provide hot water and warmth for homes and businesses. In the Finnish town of Mäntsälä, outside Helsinki, waste heat from a local data centre operated by Yandex is piped into homes, reducing local heating costs by 11 per cent and significantly cutting carbon emissions, equivalent to taking 500,000 cars off the road. In Helsinki, Telia’s data centre has been integrated into the city’s district heating system since 2022, providing carbon-neutral heating to thousands of homes. The heat generated by its servers is efficiently captured and redirected to the local heating network. This project is a part of Helsinki’s broader strategy to phase out fossil fuels and achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.
Despite our high concentration of data centres, Ireland has yet to fully capitalise on the potential of waste heat recovery. By implementing district heating systems similar to those in Finland, Ireland could not only reduce its reliance on fossil fuels but also provide a sustainable and cost-effective heating solution for its urban areas.
We are only scratching the surface. In 2023 a District Heating Scheme was set up in Tallaght, taking waste heat from an Amazon data centre and using it to heat South Dublin County Council offices and the local library. The heat is carried by hot water, which is pumped through a network of insulated pipes. The scheme is envisaged to serve 133 affordable apartments to be built on public land in Tallaght; over the lifetime of the scheme, the council envisages that it could also heat 2,000-3,000 apartments.
Why not do the same with the rest of the country’s data centres? Surely there is a win-win solution based on engineering that is far more ingenious than a simple black and white, yes or no outcome?