Ireland's data centres now consume more power than its entire rural population
The power draw of Irish datacentres has almost tripled since 2015 - from 5% to 14% of all metered electricity.
According to data from Ireland's Central Statistics Office (CSO), datacentres in the country now use more energy than all rural dwellings (12%), and are closing in on urban dwellings (21%).
The National Planning Framework, which the Irish government published in 2018, defines 'rural' as all areas outside towns with a population of less than 10,000 - although there are other definitions. The CSO itself classes rural areas as any settlement with a population of fewer than 1,500.
By any definition, Ireland has a large rural population: about 31.4% of the public live outside urban areas, according to the CSO in 2019, although other metrics put it at more than 36%. That's well above the EU average of 27.3%.
How are datacentres drawing enough power to eclipse the demands of more than 1.5 million people? It's a combination of both existing and new facilities being added to the grid, but the CSO claims that only a small number of Ireland's estimated 70 datacentres are responsible for the vast majority of power use.
An attractive island
A combination of factors draws internet giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta to Ireland. A skilled workforce, advanced infrastructure and access to renewable power, as well as government incentives like a low tax rate, are all parts of the picture.
And those multinationals are not shy about investing. According to industry group Host in Ireland, 10 new centres came online in 2021, with €7 billion spent on them in the last decade, and the same amount again expected to be spent in the next five years.
Those include two new facilities from Microsoft and two more from Amazon, all in and around Dublin. In February, state power company EirGrid placed a ban on any more datacentres being connected in the Dublin area until 2028.
And EirGrid expects demand to continue to climb: datacentres could be responsible for as much as 29% of total power demand in Ireland by 2028.
The good news is that, while Ireland's datacentres consume a lot of power (more than 1,000 GW in Q4'21), they account for only a small proportion of the country's carbon output. According to Host in Ireland datacentres only produce about 1.85% of the country's carbon footprint, thanks to their use of renewable energy.
On top of that, IT workloads continue to grow more efficient. The International Energy Agency shows that datacentres account for about 1% of the world's total energy use, but thanks to efficiency improvements their consumption has only risen about 10% in the last 10 years - despite total workloads growing by more than 9 times since 2012.
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