Ireland’s energy-hungry datacentres consumed more electricity last year than all of its urban homes combined, according to official figures.
The country’s growing fleet of datacentres used 21% of its electricity, an increase of a fifth on 2022, according to the Central Statistics Office.
It was the first year that datacentres supporting the Irish tech hub surpassed the electricity used by homes in its towns and cities, which consumed 18% of the grid’s total power last year.
Experts have raised concerns that the sudden surge in power demand driven by datacentres could derail climate targets in Ireland and across Europe.
Google, which has based its European headquarters in Ireland, said earlier this month that its datacentres risked delaying its green ambitions after driving a 48% increase in its overall emissions last year compared with 2019.
The rise in demand for data processing, driven by recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, could lead Ireland’s datacentres to consume about 31% of Ireland’s electricity within the next three years, according to the country’s National Energy and Climate Plan.
This would eclipse the electricity demand of Ireland’s urban and rural homes, which together made up 28% of overall power demand in 2023, according to the figures. It would also pile pressure on tech companies to invest more in developing their own renewable energy supplies.
Ireland’s boom in datacentres and tech companies has been fuelled by its policy of low corporate taxation.
Professor Paul Deane, a senior research fellow at University College Cork, told the Irish Examiner: “If we already had lots of wind and lots of solar, it wouldn’t be a problem.
“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.”
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Ireland relied on fossil fuels for more than 50% of its electricity last year, of which 45% was generated by gas plants and the remainder from burning coal, peat or oil. Wind power made up 34.6% of Ireland’s electricity, while solar contributed 1.2%.
Deane said Ireland “can’t have its environmental cake and eat it”.