Government “reckless” on data centres, says opposition

Opposition parties have continued their barrage of attacks on the government on the issue of data centres.

Quickly becoming a hot-button issue among Ireland’s opposition parties as electricity costs continue to rise, the government’s decision to cut gas prices for data centres has inspired another round of criticism from opposition politicians.

A new report from the Commission for Regulation of Utilities revealed that data centres would be offered cut-price rates on gas prices, in exchange for losing their priority on the electrical grid.

The optics of data centres getting cut-price rates on gas, ahead of a winter which is expected to pile on the misery for Irish households, has been scrutinised by local politicians.

People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy said that data centres already pay “much less” for their gas than households, and pay about half what householders pay for electricity. 

“This causes intense annoyance among households when, at the same time, the government refuses to provide energy credits for households facing a winter of crippling energy costs,” Murphy said.

Further research from the CRU indicates that if 17 planned data centres get the go-ahead, it would create the gas demand of 2.6 million homes.

“It beggars belief that the Irish authorities continue to bend over backwards to accommodate more and bigger data centres, even as data centres face growing resistance elsewhere. In the US, local communities are rejecting new data centres and moratoriums on data centres are spreading rapidly across large parts of the US,” Murphy said.

“What our government is doing is beyond unsustainable; it is a reckless drive toward catastrophe. We need a ban on new data centres to stop their alarming growth in consumption of our electricity, gas and water before it is too late, and existing data centres should pay at least as much for their electricity and gas as households,” the Dublin South-West TD said.

Sinn Féin MEP Lynn Boylan highlighted the part of the report which said that the connection of data centres to the gas grid could cause shortages by the winter of 2032/2033, in the event of a harsh winter.

The sheer demand generated by these centres would mean that we couldn’t import enough gas to heat homes, hospitals and businesses.

“Given that 27% of households connected to the gas grid are in arrears, it’s another insult to people for the data centres that are part of driving up the cost of energy, are being offered discounts, while households have been left in the cold by the government.” Boylan said.

The Sinn Féin MEP for Dublin explained that the gas grid may be able to meet demand if the winter was a mild one, but if it was a colder-than-average winter, then the grid will simply not have the gas it needs to cope.

“It’s ridiculous that the CRU’s proposals to ease the drain on our electricity grid from data centres are just to plug them into the gas grid – rather than to even propose a moratorium on connecting the centres to the grid,” she said.

“The demand that these centres would place on the grid is “off the charts” according to Boylan.

“The cheerleaders of data centres in government will use this as an excuse to manufacture consent for an expensive, destructive LNG terminal. Instead of saying to big tech, ‘enough is enough’, they want to give them anything they want regardless of the impact on the public and climate.”

Boylan stated, “this level of mismanagement is a sure sign that the government is repeating the exact same mistakes it made with data centres and the electricity system.”

“Rather than pushing back on the demands of big tech companies and their data centres when their usage pushed our grid into ‘amber alerts’, which mean there’s an increased risk of blackouts, they instead spent hundreds of millions of public money on temporary emergency generation to avert the worst blackouts,” she said.

“The government approach to the data centre question is reckless, and risks harming development and investment in other key areas, including housing and infrastructure.”