Data centres electricity usage surges

DATA centres are consuming more electricity than all rural homes put together, new Central Statistics Office figures show.

As Ireland struggles with soaring electricity prices, the CSO figures show that data centre electricity use has increased by almost one third in a year – now surpassing all the electricity used by 660,000 homes in rural Ireland.

Data centres are giant servers that store information found on the internet – such as photos, texts, emails and corporate data.

Electricity consumed by data centres has almost tripled in six years, from 5% in 2015 to 14% last year. That compares with the 12% of total electricity used by rural homes and 21% used by urban homes.

The CSO uses ESB statistics to define a rural home, defining it as any home in the ESB’s ‘rural domestic’ group.

There are currently 660,000 homes in that group, the CSO told the Irish Daily Mail yesterday.

The new CSO figures show that total electricity used increased by 16% over the six years with data centres accounting for 70% of the increase.

Niamh Shanahan, statistician in the CSO’s Environment and Climate Division, said that data centre electricity consumption increased from 290 gigawatt hours in January-March 2015 to 1,058 gigawatt hours in October-December 2021, with a steady increase from quarter to quarter.

Eirgrid, the State’s electricity grid operator, has said that electricity usage by data centres could rise to between 23% and 30% of overall consumption by the end of this decade. Social Democrats energy spokesperson, Jennifer Whitmore, said the surge in energy consumption by data centres underscores the Government’s ‘see-no-evil, hear-no-evil’ approach to the climate emergency.

She said: ‘The country has been convulsed in recent weeks by attempts to ban turf sales by the government. Meanwhile, data centres are consuming more electricity than every single rural dwelling combined.

‘All of the responsibility to reduce emissions is put on the individual, while the State continues to facilitate and incentivise energy-guzzling industries.’

There are about 70 data centres in Ireland, with tech giants Google, Facebook and all having centres here.

Host in Ireland, an industry group, said in a report last year that ten new centres had become operational in the previous 12 months. Some €7billion was spent on building facilities between 2010 and 2020, according to its estimates, with another €7billion expected to be invested in the five years up to 2026.