Dr. James Carton:

I will come at this from the sustainability side. I agree completely with Dr. Bresnihan and Dr. Tienhaara on the sustainability of anything, whether it is plastic production, agriculture or data centres. Certified green electricity is one technical solution that is being rolled out. As Dr. Bresnihan said, there are a lot of small projects with UPS systems which are more sustainable such as batteries and even small deployments of green hydrogen. Scale is big for these data centres and a lot of the new data centres are coming with open cycle gas turbines as their backup to the system.

There is waste heat that could potentially be used for district heating. Again, this is large scale. It needs to be deployed on the current data centres and could be a part of the planning regime for future data centres.

If we continue with what we are doing now and rely on natural gas, we are just exacerbating the problem of satisfying our Paris Agreement commitments and the commitments in the climate Bill that are to be achieved by 2030. One technical solution would be to open an auction and state that, by a particular year, data centres must be backed up by sustainable and renewable energy. That could bring in opportunities for biomethane and green hydrogen. It would certainly bring in opportunities for certified green electricity.

Deputy Bruton mentioned carbon emission taxes. Carbon pricing must be a part of this. As another Deputy mentioned, that cost should not be pushed back onto the customer. There are many solutions but it is a complex situation and we need to act now to get some of this stuff in place.