Data Centers in Ireland Overtake All Urban Electricity Use Combined

According to official figures, last year Ireland’s data centers consumed more electricity than all of the country’s urban homes for the first time, reported The Guardian.

The expanding number of data centers used 21 percent of the country’s electricity, a fifth more than in 2022, the Central Statistics Office said. In 2023, electricity used by residences in cities and towns made up 18 percent of total power consumption.

Eirgird, Ireland’s grid operator, predicted “electricity supply challenges” for the country this decade, partially because of “growth of demand driven by large energy users and data centres,” AFP reported.

The sudden rise in demand for electricity to power the data centers could thwart Ireland’s — as well as Europe’s — climate goals, experts have said, according to The Guardian.

Google’s European headquarters are in Ireland, and the company said its data centers drove a 48 percent surge in its total emissions last year, as compared with 2019, putting its green targets at risk.

In 2023, more than 50 percent of Ireland’s electricity came from fossil fuels. Wind made up 34.6 percent and solar 1.2 percent.

Ireland’s low corporate taxation policy has supported its explosion of tech companies and data centers.

“Ireland has been incredibly successful in attracting these data centres,” professor Paul Deane, a University College Cork senior research fellow, told the Irish Examiner. “It’s accounting for one fifth of all electricity demand in Ireland. At a global level, we’re closer to 1% of demand, so Ireland is an outlier.”

Increased data processing demands, driven by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI), mean data centers in Ireland could use roughly 31 percent of the country’s electricity in the next three years, the National Energy and Climate Plan said, as reported by The Guardian.

“If we already had lots of wind and lots of solar, it wouldn’t be a problem,” Dean told the Irish Examiner. “We’re still so reliant on fossil fuels. We need to be able to build up renewables very quickly. We’re good at building large datacentres quickly but not as good at building renewables.”

The “training” for AI-powered chatbots, for instance, demands enormous amounts of electricity for the powering of data centers, as well as a good deal of water to cool them down, The Conversation reported.

“AI can be a double-edged sword,” said Felippa Amanta, a Ph.D. candidate at University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, in The Conversation. “It can be a powerful tool for climate action, improving the efficiency of the energy grid, modelling climate change predictions or monitoring climate treaties. But the infrastructure needed to run AI is energy- and resource-intensive.”

And while AI is useful for making systems such as home cooling and heating more energy efficient, that efficiency can sometimes encourage the use of more power as people become accustomed to fine-tuning their environments.

“In fact, the true scale of AI’s impact on the environment is probably underestimated, especially if we focus only on the direct carbon footprint of its infrastructure. Today, AI permeates almost all aspects of our digitalised daily lives. Businesses use AI to develop, market and deliver products, content and services more efficiently, and AI influences how we search, shop, socialise and organise our everyday lives,” Amanta said. “These changes have massive implications for our total energy consumption at a time when we need to actively reduce it. And it’s not yet clear that AI will support us in making more climate-positive choices.”