Ireland's datacentres overtake electricity use of all urban homes combined
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Moving the datacenters away from East coast Dublin to West coast. Galway in an ideal world would be also useful.
They aren't being moved out. This is basic market forces, negotiation between provider and consumer. Ireland would be perfectly happy to host these datacenters should they be carbon neutral, perhaps by constructing their own green energy support system. The datacenters don't want to do that. They want cheap electricity. They want to be simple electricity consumers and thereby outsource any emissions issues to the local grid. Ireland has chosen not to take on that burden. If another country is willing, then so be it. Nobody should engage in a race-to-the-bottom on emissions. If these datacenters want to be in Ireland, they are free to foot the bill.
Renewables are the cheapest to add by far, so should be the majority of new generation capacity.
The UK, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain and Portugal all have lower carbon emissions from CO₂.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/IE (set to "Yearly" view).
Ireland only stopped burning peat for electricity last year!
Thank goodness – save it for the Whisky!
Okay, that leaves 61% going to what?
Which other industry uses have been going up or down? Then compounded by "If we already had lots of wind and lots of solar, it wouldn’t be a problem", which, as far as datacenters go probably misses the need for storage.
What this is seems more of a meme article, linking presumably evil datacenters, with climate change, with "policy of low corporate taxation."
Commercial maybe? I used to work in a Lidl and it was mentioned when they started automating their store lights inside and outside to turn off at night that it was taking a large load of the grid.
Lot's offices, SME's etc?
Warehouses? Not sure if they count as industrial or not.
And this is why we will never solve the climate issue, because we still refuse to even entertain the idea of doing what we must do, what we must have been doing for decades but have refused to so it's going to be harder and harder to quit.
There has been an increased push to run the data centres on green technologies like solar, wind, and nuclear, e.g. [1]. Due to the machines being co-located makes it easier to do this compared to every website being hosted on machines spread over the country, where it is more likely that they will be run by fossil fuels.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/rush-data-centers-cr...
There are a handful that run off of grey water, and it varies somewhat - but overall the consumption is enormous. It's a big problem for water-starved areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tea_consu...
https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/stories/irelan...
Probably yes.
Can we progress without screwing the planet and still making the top 0.01% ever exponentially richer? Probably not. Here lies the rub.
Wishful thinking that they can just blame deep structural issues like oil dependency and problematic chains of logistics on rich people and that in their absence all problems would magically solve themselves and flowers would bloom?
When whichever cause may be yours (climate, housing, faster cat photos) might actually benefit from ambition, scale, technology focused progress, better ways to even think about anything and everything.
We have to learn to grow but to do it fair. Fair for the environment and for the people (meaning not having the profits end up with the 0.01% while the workers toil for minimum wage). Only then can we really grow as humanity.
The problem is what we call "ambition" is just greed. And that keeps us in this circle of destruction.
By contrast the example I gave elsewhere in this discussion is "France ages ago noticed a problematic reliance on fossil fuels and decided to actually solve that problem (for power and heating). That was a super ambitious program of building an entire, country-size industry capable of designing, building, fueling, running and reprocessing grid-scale nuclear reactors. It even worked. Growth WHILE solving problems. But yeah, in France as elsewhere, that effort was and is tied to political will and electoral moods. And so now it's in jeopardy."
That was a giant program with participation of many private companies - not even one private one dominating costs or profits that I noticed. The newly created companies forming the project started for some, and ended up for others owned by France through many different channels: national research labs, national electric utility, development banks, government agencies, etc, etc. No doubt some private companies made excellent money from that project - but that is not its most prominent feature by far.
It was an ambitious engineering and organizational effort.
So yes "ambitious" is a good thing.
Until we recognize and reverse course on the mass extinction we're in, that era is never coming back nor should it.
Even when humanity was at its lowest creating the genetic bottleneck we were nomadic because we ate the prior area empty. Now we've progressed to sedentary lifestyles being possible long term and even soil management. The only path out is up.
Not at anything like this scale, nor this rate, as is clear from the wiki article linked above.
> the mythical era of "not causing mass extinctions" never even existed.
It existed everywhere we weren't, and again, scale and rate both matter.
> Even when humanity was at its lowest creating the genetic bottleneck we were nomadic because we ate the prior area empty.
The current consensus is a lot more complex than humans being "purely nomadic" because they "ate the prior area empty."
Evidence of early permanent settlement appears much earlier than the advent of agriculture ~12,000 years ago. Ohalo II in Israel is 23,000 years old. There's likely many other sites as old and older, but our archaeology is not advanced enough to know more.
> Now we've progressed to sedentary lifestyles being possible long term and even soil management
... What?? We're only now rediscovering soil management practices which were used hundreds/thousands of years ago by people native to areas we've all but destroyed. If we'd listened to them instead of dehumanizing and murdering them things could be different, but we can still at least not whitewash them out of history.
Globally speaking, top soil is in a variety of concurrent crises. It's in the worst shape it's ever been.
I think there's really two factors going on.
1) Everything has trade-offs and a lot of the economic growth comes with a trade-off they don't like. The top comment in this thread isn't even "screw economics", it's "I wish they built them where the wind power was". What does the N+1 data center even get us as a society while a rocket to the moon is literal science fiction.
2) Some of the "economic growth" is really just stagnation at a cheaper price. Firing ~10% of your workforce because AI-tooling (allegedly) lets you produce the same amount with less people isn't growth.
I get a lot more other deliveries too, but maybe I'm driving less to offset that? Haven't tracked this closely enough to say.
Google Maps probably has saved some fuel in that I take fewer wrong turns and don't have to double back quite so often when I'm in an unfamiliar area. Again I just have my own impressions, but GPS tech in general probably is a net win in terms of energy saved.
In past few years, it has been crypto mining ( maybe not in IR but globally definitely yes), I think we can all agree a pointless emotional fomo endeavor.
That online shopping is also debatable, people often order low quality shit they don't really need because its ridiculously cheap. Manufacturing, transport, packaging, not so great for the planet.
The days before the internet, I recall them too. Sure, you had to get to the shop, but I had way less clothing and overall everything and I kept it for longer (I am still very much an un-fashionate outlier of modern era but even for me its headed in bad direction).
Very much so. Cheap and easy. Just one click. Pure impulse. No thought.
Just put a proper cost on CO2 emissions, water usage, and land. That will naturally drive people to utilize those resources more efficiently.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/rivers-lakes-and-data-...
- AI might have the solution to electricity over-consumption today
- If not today then in the near future
- If not in the near future then before the necessary timescale for climate change reversal
- You have no reason to doubt such long time horizons; just look at the last few years and insert imagination for upcoming years
EDIT: But this would be much worse if Ireland was running on something like coal.