Busting the Myth: Data Centres and Carbon Emissions in Ireland

By Garry Connolly who is the President and Founder of Host in Ireland, a strategic global initiative created to increase awareness of the benefits of hosting digital assets in Ireland.

This Spring, life under lockdown reinforced the importance of data centres in our day-to-day lives. We have stayed connected through Zoom calls, passed the time with Netflix binges and provided our households with food and other necessities via online shopping. All of these apps and services depend on a data centre as part of our global critical infrastructure. As a result, data centre workers have been part of the government’s essential workers list, and rightfully so.

The data centre industry – particularly here in Ireland – has come under fire in regards to carbon emissions and their impact on our environment. After these last few months, however, it’s impossible to see how our reliance on data centres could possibly diminish. In fact, with many companies likely to keep work from home policies in place post-pandemic, the role of data centres in our economy is likely to increase. With this added purpose comes added responsibility both to global citizens and towards the decarbonisation of Ireland’s electricity supply.

As a result, we at Host in Ireland, in association with Bitpower, have begun tracking data centre capacity growth alongside the carbon intensity of electricity and CO2 attributable to data centres in our latest Quarterly Report. Using data from SEAI, IWEA, EPA and EirGrid, we have found that whilst the trend for data centre growth is upwards, their proportion of Ireland’s total emissions will level-off at approximately 2.2% through 2025. The numbers will continue to fall as a result of further decarbonising of the grid as part of the government’s Climate Action Plan.

There are a few key factors contributing to this trend. First, Ireland has the potential to generate far more wind power than needed and has the capacity to power 5% of Europe’s electricity requirements based on its wind generation alone. This creates a virtually untapped resource of green energy within its borders and along its coastline. Second, the growth of the Irish data centre industry will go hand-in-hand with the development of green electricity to meet power availability demands. Power availability defines the size of any data centre operation. Without a guarantee of power availability, the data centre business model would not work.

The data centre industry has recognised the importance of this via its renewable-first purchasing policies. Hyperscalers – Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook – make up 77% of the Irish data centre market and have collectively been the largest purchasers of renewable energy on the planet. Earlier this year, Microsoft pledged to be carbon neutral by 2025 and carbon negative by 2030. Google recently announced carbon-intelligent innovations to its computing platform that shifts the timing of compute tasks to when low-carbon power sources, like wind and solar, are most plentiful. Real action to address the issues is being taken.

Economically and politically maximising Ireland’s natural wind resources makes a lot of sense. There is a growing opportunity to use green wind electricity beyond merely exporting it. We have the chance to increase its “value add” in the form of data. The infrastructure to move data already exists, and exporting a data service vs a raw natural resource provides greater economic upside to an already robust export industry given ICT is responsible for €86 billion in exported services per year.

Imagine the economic impact this could have. Ireland’s untapped renewable energy is exported as data, thus multiplying the value of raw electricity. All of a sudden, it’s a whole new ball game.

Garry Connolly is the President and Founder of Host in Ireland, a strategic global initiative created to increase awareness of the benefits of hosting digital assets in Ireland.

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