Data centres in Ireland now consuming more electricity than rural homes

> Allowing electricity consumption by data centres to continue to increase would make it harder for the Government to push policies where it is asking individuals to reduce consumption at a time “when consumption by data centres is so high and clearly just growing,” said Dr Bresnihan.

This is a very wrong way to frame things. If you replace all the "data centers" in the article with "car factories", then most of the article makes very little sense. It's easy to understand that car factories make cars, that cars are useful, that they provide work and pay taxes. he problem with data centers the product is abstract, and it seams that they are just giant farm of computer coolers spinning and wasting electricity.

> The operator has said that it will not connect new data centres in Dublin for the foreseeable future because energy supply in the greater Dublin area is constrained.

That is a real problem. You don't want to cause regular electricity outages because the grid has technical problems. Data centers also don't like regular electricity outages. So the solution is to build the new ones in a area with good electric connectivity.

Here in Argentina we have a big aluminum smelter. They have a dedicated big hydroelectric electricity plant. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluar autotranslation https://es-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Aluar?_x_tr_s... (The English version has less details.)

If I made the calculation correctly, the amount of electricity they use is approximately the 10% of the electricity generation in Ireland, so almost like all the rural home in Ireland. Is aluminum useful? We export most of it, so if you like your light aluminum chair of bike, perhaps it was made with the electricity of a big hydroelectric dam in Argentina. On the other hand, the dam and the smelter are located far away from a big city. Moving it to Buenos Aires would case a lot of problems with the electric grid.

I live in Ireland and I can agree with some of the information / points the article raises. There has been a large increase in the number of data-centres in Ireland over a short period of time, and the electric supply has not expanded as quickly (in fact there has been issues in the recent past where there were several generators shut down for maintenance and there was a risk to supply, nothing to do with requirement from data-centres)....therefore there is an issue with supply vs demand.

The article states that there has been a massive increase in the demands for electricity from data-centres in the last 6 years, but fails to identify the growth in IT as a whole with that period. Another fact that also seems to be missed (intentionally or not) is that due to restrictions over the last 2 years, as a consequence of COVID, the majority of businesses in Ireland were forced to move to a "working from home" methodology instead of having everyone in the office (the offices are only now beginning to transition back to having people in the office space). As a result all these companies suddenly had a requirement for Zoom / Microsoft Teams etc to facilitate workers being remote but to also function as close as possible to "business as usual". These demands meant that in the last 2 years alone there has been a massive requirement for additional data-centres and IT infrastructure. In my mind there has been issues with supply for a prolonged period, with parts of the delivery infrastructure not being fit for purpose / requiring upgrade, these issues have just been exacerbated by the rapid incline of TECH in Ireland over a short period.