Analysis: We know there are 82 data centres in Ireland and many more on the way, but what are they actually doing?
Whether you realise it or not, every streaming show you watch, every match you make on Tinder and every flight you book is facilitated by a data centre. These sometimes enormous hubs, full of rows and rows of server racks, have become a lynchpin in Ireland's economy and a major talking point when it comes to our urgent need to cut energy emissions.
Roll back the clock and we all had home computers, floppy discs, CD-ROMs, USB sticks and external hard drives. In the office, we had computers with big towers next to them, full of hard discs, processors and memory chips. Most of that hardware has now been replaced by cloud computing and data centres, explains Dr Paul Deane, Senior Lecturer in Clean Energy Futures at the SFI Research Centre for Energy, Climate and Marine (MaRei) and the Environmental Research Institute (ERI) at UCC.
But instead of our data being stored physically and locally, it’s now stored in a relatively small number of remote locations around the world. The 'cloud’ is really shorthand for a data centre, the physical ‘reincarnation’ of the cloud.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetime, Dr Paul Deane analyses the latest CSO figures on data centre electricity usage in Ireland
Pretty much everything gets handled by a data centre, says Deane. "It's very hard to spend your week without interacting with the cloud or a data centre. If you're watching something on Netflix, listening to something on Spotify, using your tap and go card, going to the doctor, using your phone for WhatsApp, for example, everything is processed by the cloud these days.
"The obvious is social media, like photographs, video clips and personal information, but it's actually way more than that. Things like hospitals, medical records, patient records, financial institutions, banks, restaurants for bookings, airlines for processing customer information," all use data centres. Even government records and military information have to be stored somewhere.
Data centres hold "a lot of very sensitive, very important information, information that's necessary, really, for the functioning of a modern economy," says Deane. "How the energy system operates, for example, a lot of that is based on processes and information that's stored in data centres."
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From RTÉ Radio 1's The Business, Prof Aoife Foley on whether there are simple solutions to help ease the problem of data centres
How long have we had data centres in Ireland?
Data centres have been in Ireland since the late 1990s. Back then, they were pretty much invisible, says Deane. "They were targeted towards bespoke industry, large file storage, large processing activities. They were behind the scenes and the internet wasn't as robust or as strong as efficient as widespread as it is now."
But from 2010 onwards with the growth of smartphone technology, digitisation and file sharing, we saw a boom. "All these things really converged together, to really make a huge, dramatic increase in the awareness of cloud computing, but also in the use of these data centres," says Deane.
There are currently more than 8,000 data centres globally, with about 33% located in the United States, 16% in Europe and close to 10% in China. We have 82 data centres in Ireland, with a further 14 under construction and planning approved for 40 more, meaning a 65% growth in coming years.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland in 2015, Ronan Harris from Google on the company's plans to invest €150 million in its Dublin data centre
Deane points out that a large data centre would use the same amount of electricity as a city like Kilkenny. Data centres currently use 18% of all electricity in Ireland, and Eirgrid has projected this could go up to 30% by 2030. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has forecast data centres will reach a share of 32% of Ireland's total electricity demand by 2026. These are huge, outsized figures given the size of the country. In contrast, Deane says the Netherlands would be next in line in terms of overall energy use by data centres, at about 4%.
Do data centres in Ireland just hold data from Ireland?
Deane says it's not as simple to just say that Irish data is stored in Irish data centres. "It doesn't work that way. It can be information from anyone in the world, from anywhere in the world. There isn't a lot of transparency from the data centre industry on the types of data that they hold. Because a lot of it would be incredibly commercially sensitive, it would be very confidential.
"You can buy cloud services, which is kind of a fancy way for explaining that you can use their computers to do your own thing. It's not just about storing information, it's also processing information. For example, if I was to go on an airline booking website today to book a flight to somewhere, that flight would be processed via a data centre typically owned by a third-party company, by Amazon or Microsoft. There wouldn't be a physical computer in the airline company’s headquarters, processing that information would be done off-site by one of these large utilities."
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland, Oisín Coghlan from Friends of the Earth on the decision by Fingal County Council to grant planning permission for three new data centres in North Dublin
Why Ireland?
Ireland has attracted a lot of data centres thanks to a combination of factors. "If you want to locate a data centre in a country, you need a couple of things: a very stable government, a very stable democracy, because you don't want the rules around taxation changing, and you don't want the rules around privacy laws changing that much," Deane explains.
"You need it to be geologically very safe; you don't want to put it in areas where there's lots of earthquakes, or forest fires, or tsunamis. You want to have a good, educated workforce, people with the tech skills to fix these things, to build these things. You want to put it in a climate that's not too hot and not too cold. Last thing of course, you want to put it in a good tax climate."
Although there might be better weather climates for data centres in colder countries, Ireland does have one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the European Union at 12.5%, while the average rate across European OECD countries is 21.5%.
So why not Ireland?
"From my perspective, there's nothing wrong, per se, with what data centres do", says Deane, "we need them in our lives. But the challenge with data centres specifically for Ireland is not what they do, it's the huge amounts of electricity that they need to do, what they do."
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From RTÉ's Hot Mess podcast, the things we got wrong about data centres and how they could be made a part of Ireland's climate solution
Ireland's climate targets require a 50% cut in greenhouse gas emissions across the economy by 2030. For the electricity sector specifically, this rises to 75%. "But in conflict with that, we also have plans to grow our electricity demand from data centres at the same time. It’s very difficult to grow your energy demand and reduce your greenhouse gas pollution at the same time. It just doesn’t work out," says Deane.
What makes it even trickier, is that Ireland doesn't have a very clean electricity system, thanks to our reliance on fossil fuels like oil and gas. "We have one of the most polluting electricity systems, on a per unit of electricity basis, in northwest Europe. So it poses particular challenges when you add a lot of electricity demand onto a power system that's already above the European average in terms of its greenhouse gas pollution. That's the real, fundamental challenge for Ireland."
"People often roll out the argument that, well, if we didn't do this in Ireland it would be done somewhere else and that would be worse. But that's not true," he says. "Most other European countries have a power sector that's cleaner, in terms of greenhouse gas pollution. So building these things in France, the UK, Scotland, Norway, Finland or Denmark, would have a lower climate impact. But of course these countries don't necessarily have all the criteria around our government, around our tax regime, and our workforce," he adds.
From Sky News, global electricity demand from data centres is expected to double by 2026 with billions of litres of water needed to cool servers
There’s no doubt that data centres bring some form of economic benefit to Ireland, otherwise they wouldn’t be here, but this needs to be balanced with environmental protection. "It's very difficult to be world leaders in economic growth and in environment protection", says Deane.
This balancing act brings up questions around how we should be using our finite resources. Even with a growth in green energy, there’s only so much wind or hydropower we can harness, and data centres are electricity and water guzzlers.
"It’s not just about technology, it's also about time," adds Deane. "When we think of climate, time matters as well, because greenhouse gas pollution accumulates in the atmosphere over time. So during that time, should we use our scarce and precious resources for individuals or should it be dedicated to a specific industry? That's a conversation that needs to be had and needs to be settled as well."
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
