The “booming” demand for new data centres is a clear threat to Ireland’s climate targets, a new report by UCC has found. 

Last year, data centres accounted for just over one-fifth, 21%, of Ireland’s electricity consumption. 

As demand for data continues to soar, the figure is projected to rise “significantly” by the end of the decade. 

According to the report’s author, Professor Hannah Daly of UCC, it means the State’s climate targets are in jeopardy. 

“The rise of artificial intelligence brings a huge new booming era of electricity demand and growth,” she told Newstalk Breakfast. 

“These data centres train artificial intelligence models - Chat GPT and so on - they’re huge electricity demand consumers. 

“The growth might only be limited by the ability of the physical network… to accommodate them. 

“Ireland has become one of the global hubs for data centres and what this report did was lay out the facts in terms of what this is doing to our energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions.” 

A data centre is seen in March 2016. Picture by: Dmitriy Shironosov / Alamy Stock Photo

In 2021, the Government set a target of cutting Ireland’s emission by 51% by the end of the decade. 

Last year, Ireland’s emissions dropped by 2.2% but Professor Daly said they would have declined much more significantly were it not for the expansion of data centres. 

“Ireland’s electricity demand would, over the past decade, basically have been flat without data centres,” she said. 

“Because of the extraordinary growth in data centre electricity demand, our electricity demand actually grew by around 25% - which was one of the fastest rates in the EU.

“What is clear is that the rise in electricity demand and natural gas consumption is threatening our carbon budgets that we’ve all agreed on.” 

'Industry will go elsewhere'

While the expansion of data centres worries climate activists, Mike Beary, chair of the UCD Governing Authority, said they are a necessary part of any modern economy.   

“I think the important thing to keep in mind in terms of data centres is that they’re not an industry - they’re an essential enabler to society and the entire economy,” he said. 

“If we send a signal that we don’t want them anymore, industry will go elsewhere and data centres will be built elsewhere. 

“The thing about data centres is they empower every aspect of our lives today - whether it’s banking on your app, paying your taxes on Revenue.ie, checking your kids’ homework has been submitted on time, whether it’s watching a Netflix show on TV. 

“All of that is powered by data centres and the infrastructure of the cloud.” 

Two wind turbines against the backdrop of a rising sun. Image: Ian Dyball / Alamy Stock Photo

The solution, Mr Beary believes, is to expand Ireland’s renewable energy sector. 

“The grid needs to be strengthened - there’s no question,” he said. 

“We’ve missed a beat here as a country in the last 10,12-years, in investing in the grid. 

“We need to do several things at the same time; we need to be able to say, ‘How do we activate the potential for massive offshore wind?’ 

“The way we do that is we bring global investors who are willing to invest in the hard, expensive capital costs of doing that, make sure we have the right connections to our ports, to our planning process and the grid.”

According to the SEAI, last year, 40.7% of Ireland's electricity supply came from renewable energy sources.

Main image shows a data centre. Picture by: Sven Hoppe/PA.