Sir, – Joe Leake’s letter (May 23rd) regarding data centre demands raises a question that should concern every household in the country.
Are Irish consumers now effectively subsidising some of the wealthiest corporations on earth while being simultaneously lectured to about conserving electricity and lowering emissions?
Giant data centres are obtaining electricity at roughly half the price paid by ordinary domestic consumers. There is also a growing likelihood that the wider public may ultimately be obliged to help finance the additional grid reinforcement, reserve generation capacity and infrastructure required to support these vast centres in the first place.
So let us see if we understand the arrangements correctly: A pensioner in Roscommon anxiously watches the ESB bill, while an enormous warehouse full of servers generating AI advertising copy, cryptocurrency transactions and cat videos for Silicon Valley receives electricity at industrial discount rates and may also benefit from infrastructure costs being quietly spread across wider society.
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Data centres already consume about 22 per cent of Ireland’s electricity supply, with projections rising. EirGrid repeatedly warns about pressure on capacity and the need for big investment in generation and transmission infrastructure. Yet instead of asking whether a small country on the edge of Europe should devote such a staggering proportion of its energy system to multinational cloud computing, the public is assured that electricity is not being sold below production cost. Perhaps not.
But if accommodating these facilities requires billions of euro in additional infrastructure, reserve generation and grid expansion – costs ultimately borne in significant part by ordinary consumers – then many citizens may reasonably wonder whether the true national cost of this policy is being honestly acknowledged.
One suspects that if French or German households discovered they were paying nearly double the electricity rates charged to foreign-owned data centres while simultaneously being warned about constrained supply and climate obligations, the reaction might not be entirely polite.
Ireland may soon discover that becoming Europe’s server room comes at a very high price indeed. – Yours, etc,
PAUL O’SHEA
Planet Before Profit CLG,
Dublin 18.
