The South Dublin County Council refused the company’s plans for building a 72,000 square metre facility at the Grange Castle Business Park in south Dublin.It would have involved the creation of 50 jobs when operational, as per a report by The Irish Times.
Why Google has been denied permission for new data centre
The council reportedly wrote that Google did not provide enough detail on “how the proposal will impact the power supply once operational” in 2027, according to the decision. It said that “the existing insufficient capacity in the electricity network (grid) and the lack of significant on-site renewable energy to power the data centre” were reasons for refusal.
This decision comes amidst growing public opposition to data centres in Ireland, fueled by their significant energy use at a time when the country is struggling to meet its carbon emissions targets.
Citing data by the Central Statistics Office, data centres used about 21% of all electricity generated in the State in 2023, compared to 5% in 2015. This figure is projected to rise to 27% by 2028 and the centres already use more power than all urban households in the State.
Furthermore, Google’s proposed data centre is said to have indirectly contributed 224,250 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually without mitigation measures.
In September 2011, we announced that we would invest €75 million to convert a warehouse on an industrial site in West Dublin into our third energy-efficient data centre in Europe. To date, we’ve invested approximately €500 million to build and operate data centres on our Dublin site.
Google’s first data centre was announced in 2011 when the company converted a warehouse in Dublin, and the centre went live in 2012. The company was granted permission to build a two-story, 30,360 sqm (326,790 sq ft) data centre next to its existing facility in 2014.