Ciarán Ahern (Dublin South West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome this debate. Now and in the years to come, AI and how we effectively use and regulate it will be one of the key challenges we face as legislators.

As my colleague, Deputy Lawlor, has said, there is enormous potential for Al to have a really transformative and positive impact for workers if it is applied in a fair manner and everyone can benefit from it. It is crucial that Al does not just become another way for big businesses to bump up their profits. I echo Deputy Lawlor’s point that we must take a human-centred approach to all this.

I will focus my remarks on the climate element in the debate on Al. It has been suggested by some in the tech sector that Al has a massive role to play in helping us to address the climate crisis and that the positives of Al will outweigh the negatives. I do not doubt that it certainly can have some impact in helping us with things like tracking extreme weather events or identifying areas of environmental or biodiversity concern, but I am not sold on the argument that Al is the answer to all our climate problems. The core issue right now is whether these potentially positive applications of Al outweigh the negatives in terms of the level of energy it consumes. The reality is that using an Al tool like ChatGPT takes an enormous amount of energy. A search on ChatGPT uses around ten times more energy than a Google search. AI is proliferating rapidly and, with it, the ever-growing need for data centres. We really do need to concern ourselves with the amount of energy it uses and how this affects not just our energy security and the cost of electricity for ordinary people, but also our climate ambitions. It is in this context that I was extremely concerned by the proposed new rules regarding data centres published by the CRU yesterday. Quite frankly, the new rules fly in the face of our climate goals. Ideally, and this is something we in the Labour Party have called for consistently, we would have a moratorium on new data centres, at least until we can be sure that they will not pose a threat to or put pressure on our grid or pose a threat to our climate targets.

Nonetheless, the Government seems content to plough ahead with them. It it is welcome that data centres will be required to power themselves rather than taking power from the national grid but it is hugely concerning that there is nothing in the proposed rules to state that their power sources must be clean, renewable, sustainable sources. We know that data centres consume enormous amounts of energy. Currently 50% of electricity produced in Dublin and Meath is going to data centres and more than a fifth of the total amount of electricity used in Ireland is going to data centres. The latter percentage is projected to grow to up to 30% over the next few years. That is more electricity usage than all the homes in the country, yet there is nothing in the draft rules to state that data centres must be powered with clean energy. What is stopping data centres from importing and using more dirty fuel at precisely the time we should be moving away from this? The CRU must clarify in the finalised rules that data centres have to power themselves using sustainable, renewable sources. The growth in Al use will inevitably mean that the already high consumption of energy in data centres grows further, so proper regulatory and legislative frameworks must be put in place now to ensure that they do not impact on our vital climate targets.

Given that the Government seems intent on green-lighting more data centres, we need to start looking seriously at using the waste heat they generate. The Tallaght district heating scheme in my own constituency of Dublin South-West uses waste heat from a nearby data centre to heat council buildings and the TU Dublin Tallaght campus. It has been hugely successful. The model is already there. It is welcome that plans are in place in South Dublin County Council to roll out district heating in more areas and to start heating affordable homes elsewhere in the constituency. We need to see more of that, and I urge the Government to use the Tallaght model to roll out district heating and heat capture from data centres to other areas.

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