This Halloween, meet one of the biggest climate villians draining the life from Ireland’s resources…

Why we need a moratorium on Data Centres 

Over the summer the news broke that Data Centres are soaking up 21% of our energy. This is not normal - in fact it is eye watering when we compare it to the European average of 2%. Successive governments and Ministers have allowed the Data Centre industry to rapidly expand in Ireland at the expense of our climate commitments, our ability to build and generate clean renewables, and our natural resources. 

With a new Government due to take office in the next few months, we want to make Data Centres and their impacts an election issue. There are a few ways Friends of the Earth supporters can take action on Data Centres right now, but before we get into that let us give you an introduction to the vampiric industry draining our energy and resources for its own private gain. 

Why is the Data Centre lobby so powerful here? 

The excuse that is often given is that Data Centres create employment, but when Minister Peter Burke was pressed on this last week at the Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action, he couldn’t give a figure as to how many people Data Centres directly employ.  The Lobby Register shows that since becoming Minister for Trade this Spring, T.D. Peter Burke has been lobbied multiple times by Big Tech companies and Data Centre developers like Amazon and Cyrus One. 

The inability of the Minister of Trade to give a straight answer on how many jobs are actually created within communities where Data Centres are built is just one of the many issues there are around Data Centres and transparency. The Data Centre industry is largely self-reporting, and often refuses to disclose certain data, arguing it is too “commercially sensitive.” This has led some researchers to believe that major Big Tech companies are under-reporting emissions by over 600%. 

The figures we do have paint an extremely worrying picture. Data Centres are mostly gas-powered, and extremely energy and water intensive. There are over 90 Data Centres operational in Ireland with multiple Data Centres in the planning process. At a time where we need to lower our emissions for the sake of our planet and our ecosystems, Data Centre emissions are rising consistently. When you think about the fact that all political parties bar one voted in favour of the Climate Law, mandating that we have to lower our emissions 51% by 2030, and respect EU obligations to lower emissions or face significant financial fines, it is farcical that one industry appears to being given a free pass to increase emissions without limits. Herbata Ltd, an Irish data centre development company recently applied for planning permission in Kildare for a data centre which over its lifetime would use over 29 million tonnes of CO2 - a whopping 4% of our total carbon budget for one data centre alone. 

Read more about the reasons we need to fight Data Centre expansion here 

 

Who are they for?

It is easy to think we as members of the public are responsible for the increase in Data Centres. Phones, data storage, online banking, all require the type of cloud storage Data Centres offer. But the unlimited growth of Data Centres we are seeing is mainly fuelled by the industry itself developing new advertising products to increase its profits or expanding its AI capacity. In her work on Amazon for example, Joanna Moll showed how in order to purchase a book, “the Amazon website forces the customer to go through twelve different interfaces composed of large amounts of code, which is normally invisible to the averageuser… adding up to 87.33MB of information.”

AI products are around 10% more energy intensive than more “traditional” web processes. The growth of AI is projected to increase global Data Centre energy consumption by 160%, and despite what the industry likes to say about its green credentials, the energy that will fuel this is old fashioned, climate wrecking gas. In Ireland, we expanded new gas generation over the last two years to deal with the rise in energy usage - and as Eirgrid’s former CEO said himself, this was mostly to power the rise of Data Centres. 

What can we do about it? 

Thankfully, we are seeing some pushback. Kildare County Council has already put the brakes on the Herbata Data Centre. South Dublin County Council also recently pushed back by refusing permission to an extension of Google’s Data Centre in Grange Castle, which, if built, would consume as much energy as a quarter of a million homes. But Data Centre operators can and will appeal these decisions. What we urgently need is an actual moratorium on further Data Centre growth. 

At Friends of the Earth we are demanding that the next Government prioritise clean, cheaper, and future-proofed renewables for homes and public good, not for private Big Tech. We believe that a future where Data Centres are allowed to expand infinitely and soak up all the available renewables is not realistic or desirable. Instead, we urgently need a fair and just energy transition that prioritises public good over private profit - a transition that lowers our energy demand and takes expensive and dirty fossil fuels out of homes and communities for the sake of our health and our planet. We are calling for a legally binding moratorium on Data Centre growth until a much more robust framework is in place, one that ensures that Data Centres are functioning within legally binding pollution limits. 

 

How can you help? 

Over the next few months we are ramping up our campaigning on data centres and we want you to get involved. Today you can: 

• Sign our e-action and demand a moratorium 
• Make Data Centres an election issue; let local election candidates know that you want to see a moratorium introduced. Better yet, sign up to take action with us on the 12th November, when we want to get climate justice demands into the community. 
• Donate to help us strengthen our Data Centre work and reach more people across the country. 
• Share our educational resources on Data Centres - we even made a TikTok about them!

 

Read, watch and listen to more resources on Data Centres here