Professor Barry McMullin:

I am on so I will take first cut and pass it over to Professor Daly. I thank the Deputy, from one DCU alumnus to another.

As regards the data centre issue specifically, the Deputy suggested that maybe we could have positive effects from data centre growth and that they would involve the deployment of more renewables. At best they would involve the deployment of more renewables to just about match the expansion in energy consumption. That is not improving things; it is at best just not making things worse. However, that would be true only if there were not these constraints. We have limited sites for new renewables development, we have limited capacity in the planning system, we have limited capacity in local communities to engage - we have all these constraints, so we need to develop renewables at the absolute maximum rate we possibly can in order to drive down our usage of fossil fuels for everything we are currently doing.

If some of the renewable sites, some of the capacity in the planning system, some of the expert engineers and some other critical resources are carved out to serve as data centres, that will inevitably slow down the deployment of renewable energy for our other needs. We hope this is a medium-term issue. It involves 20 or 30 years, rather than five years. We are trying to transform the entire energy system. When we get to the happy situation where we have 100% zero-carbon energy fully deployed, let us expand any and all energy use that we like. However, we are not in that happy situation and we will not be for at least 30 years.

The issue of waste heat is a bit of a red herring in the Irish context because we do not have the established heat networks. Heat networks are great. They do not serve every heat need but they are great and we know that from SEAI reporting on it some years ago. Accelerating the development of heat networks in Ireland would be very useful, but I would not do it on the basis that it would give a role to data centres that they would not otherwise have; we should do it because it is a way of decarbonising heat. We should remember that data centres may come and go for various reasons. If we have built them into the provision of heating as a critical source of heat and they go, we will have a different problem. Many things are bound up in there.