Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 15 November 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action

Future Licences and Contracts to Connect Data Centres to the Gas Network: Discussion

Photo of Paul MurphyPaul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I understand that answer. Maybe I will unpack it in a couple of different ways. It may be the case that Ms Donnelly and I disagree on how positive data centres are for our society. Senator Dooley compared data centres to the filing cabinets of the 1980s. In responding Ms Donnelly did not disagree with that. Let us say 18% of our electricity consumption at the moment goes on data centres. What percentage of data centre energy usage is equivalent to filing? To what extent is it the storage of our emails, health data and other things which, in the past, would have been in filing cabinets? How much of that energy usage is made up of that sort of filing?

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