Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will try to be brief.

Senator Higgins has made many of the relevant points. It is regrettable that every time we talk about emergency electricity generation people conflate the supply issue with the generation issue. This is disappointing and it is exploiting the issue, because these are two completely different things. We could have all the gas supply in the world, but we do not have the generators required to produce electricity to feed the insatiable demand. This is an important point and it is used and exploited every time we come in here and debate these issues around emergency generation.

That is for another day, however. Undoubtedly, it will be trotted out again, and by various think tanks as well, whose representatives are regularly on the airwaves. This amendment is trying to ensure that the EPA, which already has a weak enough reference to take account of the climate legislation, does so and that this obligation is not removed. The Minister of State said all the data centres now must have 100% emergency back-up generation. It is astounding, however, that there is no determination regarding what type of emergency generation backup this will be. It is astounding that we are in the situation where we could have diesel generators just to feed data centres. People say the data centres are our bogeyman and that we hate them all, but we do not. I have never said we do not need data centres. We absolutely do. Equally, not all large energy users are the same. They are not all equal. Large energy users, like big pharmaceutical companies, are essential. Data centres that process information to help us to do remote work are essential. It is the same for those that have databases for the sharing of information and moving things around online rather than on paper. This is all essential.

Let us be honest about the type of data centres we have in Ireland, in addition to those important large energy users. This is why it will be important that the EPA would also be able to determine which of these large energy users would have to switch off or lower their power consumption. If we look at the types of data centres like the Facebooks, the Googles and the Amazons, it will be seen that Facebook and Google are the world's largest advertising companies. This is the reality. We can talk about social media, but these companies are the world's largest advertising companies. Some 84% of the revenue of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, came from advertising. For Facebook, 98.5% of its revenue came from advertising. We know these companies use a system called real-time bidding, which is where they take people's personal data, monitor them online and use surveillance data to decide what are people's likes, dislikes and moods. They then target adverts to people specifically and this happens in little mini auctions that are ongoing continuously throughout the day. In fact, in 2022, some 178 trillion transactions took place in terms of these advertisements. For every option that is determined to target people, only one advert will pop up on their social media platform. In that process, however, 99.99% of the computer energy used in the real-time bidding option is wasted. Those adverts never see the light of day. This is the reality we are dealing with here and it is important that we talk about facts.

I say this because it is always thrown out that we are just opposed to data centres and all large energy users. It is not true. What we are opposed to is this type of insidious advertising that is just burning up energy needlessly and pushing a consumer, growth-driven agenda. When it comes to keeping the lights on and preventing brownouts, what we want is to have a scale of who is prioritised and who needs to power down. This is all we are asking for. We are asking that these aspects be targeted in this way, so that the essential things, like households, hospitals, etc., will keep the lights on first, before those data centres that are just needlessly burning up energy.

I agree with Senator Higgins, as I think does everybody here today who is on the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action, that it does matter what Ireland does. What is the point of the Paris Agreement? International reputation was mentioned. What sort of international reputation will we have if we go out and just say, "Do you know what, it does not matter what Ireland does, the planet can burn". This is as equally damaging to our international reputation as just asking data centres to use energy efficiently.