Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Social Democrats for bringing forward this motion. We do not seem to have a coherent strategy on the development of this industry and its impact on our current electricity and water infrastructure. It seems planning applications are made and decided at local level in local authorities. How are we planning to reduce the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity at a time when we will have 1 million extra electric cars, hundreds of data centres and an increase in population of more than 1 million people, as projected for the coming decades?

Seventy data centres have been built and at least 30 more have been planned, which will put immense pressure on the grid at a major cost to the taxpayer. We will spend €9 billion on the grid to allow Amazon, Microsoft and their peers to set up data centres. As has been said, Dr. Patrick Bresnihan of NUI Maynooth told the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Environment and Climate Action this week that while data centres currently represent 11% of the grid capacity, the energy used by those existing connections will rise to almost 30% of overall capacity by the end of this decade. This compares with the worldwide situation where only 2% of electricity is consumed by data centres. My constituency of Dublin West has seen a significant number of these data centres and a massive data centre is currently under construction just across the border in Clonee, County Meath. The Amazon data centre in Mulhuddart will use the same amount of electricity as Galway. That is astonishing. The people of Ireland are not stupid and can appreciate the problems that will arise with the vast number of data centres planned. They hear about rolling blackouts nearly every week which are covered in the media and discussed on radio and television.

Some 59% of people polled by RED C want data centre development to be controlled to reduce rolling electricity blackouts. They want a restriction of data centres to avoid these blackouts and help the country to achieve its climate targets. Does the Minister have the authority to demand these data centres would switch to auxiliary powers in the event that we have rolling blackouts and do not have the capacity to provide electricity for people in their homes?

See this speech in context