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

Ireland’s electricity emissions increased by 4% in the past year. The climate action plan requires electricity emissions to fall by 75% by 2030. Almost the entire carbon budget for electricity up to 2025 has now already been used up. The main reason is that electricity generation increased by 3%. Even though coal and oil generation fell and wind generation rose, emissions still increased because of a 10% increase in electricity produced by natural gas. Everybody knows that the main reason for this is the proliferation of data centres which the Government has encouraged.

Between 2015 and 2021, electricity consumption rose by 16%, and 70% of that was swallowed up by data centres, which used more electricity than all rural homes in this State combined. If the Government keeps enabling multinationals to dump their data centres here, we will be running to go backwards in respect of emissions. Will the Taoiseach commit to an immediate ban on further data centres?

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