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

The NRP deals with climate action and the environment. I want to ask the Taoiseach what would it take for this Government to reverse its disastrous course on data centres and reject the policy of consciously seeking to attract what is the digital toxic waste of the 21st century. We have an incredible situation, unparalleled anywhere else in the world, whereby data centres are using up more electricity than all of our urban homes combined. Will it stop when we reach 30%? Will it stop when we have more brownouts? Will it stop when we have blackouts? In circumstances where these data centres provide very few jobs and where they use inordinate amounts of electricity and substantial amounts of water, what will it take to stop what is going on? This is all happening in a context where we have to change how our economy operates. The things that are currently run directly on the basis of fossil fuels have to be shifted to electric, and we need to move rapidly to renewable energy. If we keep expanding energy usage on unnecessary things such as these big companies running algorithms to target people with advertisements, which is a big part of what is happening in these data centres, we will make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get to 100% renewables.

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