Mr. Brendan Tuohy:

Yes. A lot of work has been done on this matter. The Government issued a statement last year and IDA Ireland has done a lot of work. Let me put this in context. While the energy requirements of data centres are dramatic, I note that as a country, we have a phenomenal ICT sector comprised of 130,000 people and exports worth €65 billion per year, which makes it a huge sector. What now happens when one puts data centres in, and I agree with the IDA on this, is that they bring a stickiness to the market so that the companies invest significant amounts of money here. To date, €7 billion or €8 billion has gone into the data centres, which then spurs on other things. Many of the data centres will in time become computational centres. In other words, the running of algorithms and stuff like that will take place in the centres. Will that be more energy intensive? Yes.

There is another side to this issue. Recently a significant company did a corporate purchase power agreement, which meant it was not relying on the grid, the network or the public service obligation, PSO. In fairness, many of the data centre companies care about the environment, ask for the centres to be powered by green energy and many of the companies are prepared to put their hand in their own pocket to pay for such energy. As I said before the Deputy arrived, using our median predictions for the future we predict that about 29% of energy usage by 2028 could be due to data centres, so by far and away the single biggest user. One must then ask oneself the following. If one takes that in the broader context of not just the ICT sector but everybody moving to the cloud, we must position ourselves, as a country, in that space.