Eamon Ryan has defended his role in making Ireland “the world’s leading centre of data centres” as he expressed confidence they could be operated in a low-carbon manner.
The outgoing Minister for Environment, Climate and Energy said they will need an ever-increasing amount of electricity but that can be met by renewable energy sources, while artificial intelligence (AI) combined with information technology advances will no longer mean they have to be concentrated in the Dublin region.
The former Green Party leader said data centres remain a critical part of the Irish economy and should not be curbed, though low-carbon solutions with grid connections must be provided first.
“Ireland is the world’s leading centre of data centres, bar none. Silver-medal place probably goes to the [US] state of Virginia, just south of Washington. There’s no one else even in the bronze-medal place, we’ve a factor of 10 higher concentration of data centres than our European colleagues – and that brings real benefits and strength to the country,” Mr Ryan said.
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Unchecked growth in Irish data centres fuelled by an AI boom is undermining Ireland’s ability to meet critical 2030 climate targets, a study by UCC energy analyst Prof Hannah Daly has found. This was driving additional emissions from both electricity and natural gas consumption, and threatening legally-binding carbon budgets.
Mr Ryan said: “There’s huge advantages to Ireland by having data centres; it’s a bedrock of companies that also employ a lot of people; Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and also bring a lot of tax revenue to the State, and technological and innovation capability.”
The Minister strongly disagreed with former EirGrid chief executive Mark Foley, who believed gas-fired power generation could meet escalating data centre demand. Mr Ryan also rejected his view that if Ireland does not have healthy demand growth for electricity, offshore wind farms will not be “financeable”.
The Minister (who remains in office until the next government is formed) said he attended an International Energy Agency meeting in Paris recently on AI in energy and it was clear Ireland was the global leader in data centre development. Significant Irish companies had become “experts in how you run data centres in a low-carbon way. So, we have real advantages from having data centres here”.
Coming into government in 2020, however, he realised “we had a problem, because we left the door wide open, and there was an infinite demand for new data centres coming. We knew then we would not be able to cope.
“So we immediately said, put the alarm bells on. We have to be careful here because we can’t give false promises. We can’t just promise we can get new connections.”
The approach was “we will bring new data centres in, but we have to wait until our grid is able to cope with that, and we can be certain we can do it in low-carbon way, which I believe we can”.
Mr Ryan said he had “highest regard for EirGrid”, a world leader in balancing variable demand and variable electricity supply, “including having a large chunk of data centres in the system”.
The data centre issue damaged the greens in government, he added, because people said, “Oh God, that guy’s anti-development. That guy doesn’t want jobs because it’s an ideological thing – it’s not. Physically, the grid cannot cope. It cannot until we build new grid development, and until we make sure that it’s part of a low-carbon solution.”
But he rejected Mr Foley’s view “that we could perhaps use gas-fired generation to run data centres so you could still increase capacity, but you wouldn’t necessarily have to the electricity grid and the renewables to support that to make it low carbon”.
He wrote a letter to Gas Networks Ireland and government colleagues to say: “No, we cannot do it if it’s not compliant with the climate legislation.”
Google, Microsoft and Amazon agree with this, he added, “they cannot run cloud-based services, or particularly AI services now, which are in a high-carbon manner “.
Mr Ryan highlighted Bord na Móna’s building of an energy park in the midlands “where you put renewables, storage, other industrial processing together to take the waste heat. This was mentioned at the IEA as a leading example where everyone needs to go”.
Ireland gained critical advantage when it installed a fibre-optic link with the US with connection points concentrated around Dublin, part of a cloud-based system. Now AI is going to massively expand data centre use “but it means you can be 400km from where the strongest digital connection point is; you don’t have to have as strong a fibre connection point”.
They can be put in ports such as Cork, Waterford or Shannon Estuary. Distance was no longer a problem, though grid capacity was needed to make it work.
A plan-lead system with designated areas for renewables development known as D-maps facilities this process while grid connections, including nearby interconnectors, were being tied in – as was happening in the port of Cork and into Great Island in Co Wexford.
EirGrid were centrally involved in this through its Shaping Our Electricity Future strategy. “It says we build the industry demand close to the arrival point of the offshore, rather than having to build grid all over the island. That’s the way it’s going to go, because there’s a physical reality.”
“The real shocking thing for me in Paris last was hearing some of the finance people saying, ‘Yeah, America’s just going to use gas to run data centres’ ... Running a social media network on gas is beyond the pale in every way”, he said.
“They will run a certain amount of gas. You do need this part of the balancing system. I believe it should be biomethane, which is zero carbon, we which we can deliver locally, and we can do power purchase agreements – with Climate and Nature Fund spending done in places, so that they know that this is coming. That’s why you need to give predictability.”
While some gas would be needed, the revolution happening in longer-term storage and batteries, as well as development of renewables, both solar and wind, and using grid interconnectors would reduce that requirement, he said.
The Minister said floating offshore will be cracked with the plan-led approach, but it would take time after fixed-bottom turbines have been deployed first at a depth of up to 50-60 metres – and especially because high wind speeds off the south and west coasts would give Ireland competitive advantage.
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