Microsoft plans to build gas power station as part of €900m data centre

Microsoft has announced plans to build a gas power station as part of it’s €900m data centre development in Grange Castle, south Dublin.

The tech giant says the power station will ease the strain on the national grid which local councillors say is being driven by data centres.

The project will include building a 170-megawatt (MW) on-site power plant plus 21 diesel-powered generators to fuel the energy-demanding centre.

Microsoft applied for a special industrial emissions licence from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to operate the power station last week.

It is estimated that the company will spend €875m building the two planned data centres and gas power station.

The data centres were granted planning permission in May and will have a floor space of 145,000 square feet each.

However, South Dublin County Councillors have hit out at Microsoft’s plans saying the power station is not the solution to the “data centre problem”.

Data centres’ power usage rose by 32 percent between 2020 and 2021 with Eirgrid predicting that they could account for 14 percent of all electricity use in the state by 2028.

People Before Profit councillor Madeleine Johansson says that while the power station “doesn’t add to the congestion of the national electricity grid it will contribute to Ireland’s carbon emissions.

“The plan for a private gas power plant is clearly a way for Microsoft to circumvent the new stricter criteria for data centres in the Dublin Region.

“But if we continue to allow more data centres to be built we won’t be able to cut down our carbon emissions and will ultimately face fines from the European Union.

“It is not acceptable that the tax payer will have to pay fines for the irresponsible emissions of large corporations.

“This is one of the reasons why I proposed an effective ban on data centres in South Dublin until 2028, a ban which the Minister for Local Government overturned last month.”

Johansson says that natural gas should be phased out as a source of energy rather than promoted.

“There has been a worrying development of recategorizing natural gas as a “green fuel” when in reality natural gas is a fossil fuel and needs to be phased out,” she says.

“We need an increased investment in renewable sources of energy such as hydro power, wind and solar power.

“Until such a time when the grid has adequate capacity from renewable sources, there should be a ban on any new data centres.”

Minister for the Environment Eamon Ryan TD said the high use of energy by data centres is a “short term problem.”

“By the end of this decade, when we develop offshore wind at scale – which we will – then we will provide a mechanism where we can retain the jobs, retain those companies here and more important than that be a low-carbon location where they want to come.

“There aren’t any new [data centres] being allowed at the moment.

“We can’t offer any new data centres until we get agreement on how [the companies plan to] provide backup renewable power that will complement the grid, and strengthen our grid, and that you locate the data centres in places where we can actually support them.

“In Dublin that is now limited.”