5 ms·

Ireland's datacentres overtake electricity use of all urban homes combined

52 points by nemoniac 2y ago

vonzepp 2y ago
I find this debate a bit odd. Climate change is a global issue. So moving these emissions out of Ireland so Ireland can reach it's targets doesn't help if those emissions mearly happen elsewhere in the world. In reality, there is two options either these data centers are simply not built, which isn't going to happen. Or rich countries such as Ireland, take it on to themselves to see taken on datacenters as a burden they must carry, coupled with increased renewables. With Ireland's wind on the west coast potential, this is something we must Especially with a temperant climate Moving the datacenters away from East coast Dublin to West coast. Galway in an ideal world would be also useful.
- rakoo 2y ago
  > either these data centers are simply not built, which isn't going to happen And this is why we will never solve the climate issue, because we still refuse to even entertain the idea of doing what we must do, what we must have been doing for decades but have refused to so it's going to be harder and harder to quit.
- Symbiote 2y ago
  Ireland's energy isn't particularly green, compared to nearby countries. The UK, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain and Portugal all have lower carbon emissions from CO₂. https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/IE https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/IE (set to "Yearly" view). Ireland only stopped burning peat for electricity last year!
  - vonzepp 2y ago
    Nuclear being illegal in Ireland doesn't help.
    - lawlessone 2y ago
      I'd be ok with it. As long as nobody that's contracted to build housing or apartments here is involved. We'd somehow have meltdown before they laid the foundation.
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      Considering how things are built in Ireland that's a great thing for the world, trust me.
  - dumbo-octopus 2y ago
    > stopped burning peat for electricity Thank goodness – save it for the Whisky!
    - cuSetanta 2y ago
      Pah, good irish Whiskey doesn't need to add dirt to add flavour, leave that to the Scotch!
- creer 2y ago
  Exactly. Furthermore, the fine article mentions 21% going to datacenters (of which, which fraction might be off-shoreable anyway?), and 18% to homes. Okay, that leaves 61% going to what? Which other industry uses have been going up or down? Then compounded by "If we already had lots of wind and lots of solar, it wouldn’t be a problem", which, as far as datacenters go probably misses the need for storage. What this is seems more of a meme article, linking presumably evil datacenters, with climate change, with "policy of low corporate taxation."
  - lawlessone 2y ago
    >Okay, that leaves 61% going to what? Commercial maybe? I used to work in a Lidl and it was mentioned when they started automating their store lights inside and outside to turn off at night that it was taking a large load of the grid. Lot's offices, SME's etc? Warehouses? Not sure if they count as industrial or not.
    - creer 2y ago
      Of course. And metals smelters, and street lighting. Whatever. The point was that the fine article didn't care about that because it was a political hatchet job, rather than informing on how or why electric power is used in Ireland.
- sandworm101 2y ago
  >> moving these emissions out of Ireland so Ireland can reach it's targets doesn't help if those emissions mearly happen elsewhere They aren't being moved out. This is basic market forces, negotiation between provider and consumer. Ireland would be perfectly happy to host these datacenters should they be carbon neutral, perhaps by constructing their own green energy support system. The datacenters don't want to do that. They want cheap electricity. They want to be simple electricity consumers and thereby outsource any emissions issues to the local grid. Ireland has chosen not to take on that burden. If another country is willing, then so be it. Nobody should engage in a race-to-the-bottom on emissions. If these datacenters want to be in Ireland, they are free to foot the bill.
  - gibolt 2y ago
    That is generally how utilities work. More demand == more money, which leads to more power plants / wind / solar to power it. Renewables are the cheapest to add by far, so should be the majority of new generation capacity.
- glitchc 2y ago
  I think others have already alluded to this, but the source of the electricity is the important bit. A datacenter running entirely on hydroelectricity is significantly greener than one running on coal. Moving the datacenter to a location where the source is as green as possible can have a big impact on emissions.
- btbuildem 2y ago
  Presumably you'd keep evicting them out of these tax havens until the only option they've got left is to innovate and optimize energy use, or heavily invest into renewable sources that don't have a huge heat/pollution footprint.
- atoav 2y ago
  Or 3: We need to think more for what those datacenters are used, make our programs more efficient, ...
torcete 2y ago
I'm old enough to remember the world without a constant presence of the internet and connectivity. I wonder how much energy these datacenters have actually saved thanks to technologies like google maps, email, online shopping, etc..
- jajko 2y ago
  The consumption now and in near future will be mostly driven by large AI models, to generate some crazy images, scam some people, and maybe also help individuals and companies a bit. I am not holding my breath on some overall positive effect. In past few years, it has been crypto mining ( maybe not in IR but globally definitely yes), I think we can all agree a pointless emotional fomo endeavor. That online shopping is also debatable, people often order low quality shit they don't really need because its ridiculously cheap. Manufacturing, transport, packaging, not so great for the planet. The days before the internet, I recall them too. Sure, you had to get to the shop, but I had way less clothing and overall everything and I kept it for longer (I am still very much an un-fashionate outlier of modern era but even for me its headed in bad direction).
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    > people often order low quality shit they don't really need because its ridiculously cheap Very much so. Cheap and easy. Just one click. Pure impulse. No thought.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  I still get a visit from the mailman in his little truck six days a week. So email has saved nothing there. I get a lot more other deliveries too, but maybe I'm driving less to offset that? Haven't tracked this closely enough to say. Google Maps probably has saved some fuel in that I take fewer wrong turns and don't have to double back quite so often when I'm in an unfamiliar area. Again I just have my own impressions, but GPS tech in general probably is a net win in terms of energy saved.
  - Nasrudith 2y ago
johndunne 2y ago
Ireland is upping its game to take advantage of it being a very ‘windy’ country. A 130 tonne flywheel, spinning inside a vacuum at 3000 rpm is set to offer some inertia to stabilise the grid, a common problem with wind power production. We’ll need this if we’re to meet power demands and achieve the Irish government’s lofty wind power ambitions. https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/stories/irelands-great-grid-stabilizer.html https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/stories/irelan...
keybored 2y ago
This is no match for the AI apologetic. - AI might have the solution to electricity over-consumption today - If not today then in the near future - If not in the near future then before the necessary timescale for climate change reversal - You have no reason to doubt such long time horizons; just look at the last few years and insert imagination for upcoming years EDIT: But this would be much worse if Ireland was running on something like coal.
drpgq 2y ago
Does Quebec have a massive number of datacentres? They're close the Eastern seaboard and have cheap electricity and relatively cold too.
- ElectricSpoon 2y ago
  Quebec does have a few. Amongst the issues is that scaling hydro power is hugely expensive, is riddled with red tape, and over all takes too long. Meanwhile you could build a datacenter and a solar farm in Texas and be up in 2 years.
rhdunn 2y ago
Data centres consuming electricity isn't the problem. The problem is running those data centres on fossil fuels. There has been an increased push to run the data centres on green technologies like solar, wind, and nuclear, e.g. [1]. Due to the machines being co-located makes it easier to do this compared to every website being hosted on machines spread over the country, where it is more likely that they will be run by fossil fuels. [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/rush-data-centers-creates-us-solar-hotspots-2024-02-22/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/rush-data-centers-cr...
- Night_Thastus 2y ago
  Another problem is water consumption. People don't realize it, but these data centers also consume incredible amounts of fresh water. There are a handful that run off of grey water, and it varies somewhat - but overall the consumption is enormous. It's a big problem for water-starved areas.
  - rhplus 2y ago
    How do they consume the water exactly? If it’s just heat transfer, couldn’t it be reused once it passes through the data center? I would assume a small and cold country like Ireland could make good use of warm water, especially given its #2 ranking on tea consumption per capita! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tea_consumption_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tea_consu...
    - birken 2y ago
      A datacenter could consume a lot of water with evaporative cooling. I don't know how prevalent it is, but given how cheap and efficient evaporative cooling is, I'd guess datacenters use it a lot where possible (probably in combination with other cooling methods).
    - Night_Thastus 2y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJYSzc7YkY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJYSzc7YkY0
dmoo 2y ago
Ireland’s energy sources https://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/key-statistics/energy-use-overview/ https://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/key-st...
perihelions 2y ago
I miss the cultural era that was enthusiastic about economic growth. Most stories I see on HN, and other places, now react with reflexive condemnation of any kind of human industry. I worry about where this zeitgeist will lead us.
- ddulaney 2y ago
  I miss that era too. But the shift isn’t purely cultural: it’s an acknowledgement of the underlying reality that climate change is getting to be real bad. I worry about where a growth-at-all-costs mindset has lead us at least as much.
  - creer 2y ago
    Has "at-all-costs" ever been the idea? Is it the only way?
- convolvatron 2y ago
  I'm confused as to why growth and progress as a species is tied inexorably to the mindlessly wasteful consumption of fossil fuels to the detriment of our own ability to live comfortably and feed ourselves. aren't we clever? can't we progress without screwing up the planet?
  - creer 2y ago
    Right? That's the problem. There is nothing inexorable about it. France ages ago noticed a problematic reliance on fossile fuels and decided to actually solve that problem (for power and heating). That was a super ambitious program of building an entire, country-size industry capable of designing, building, fueling, running and reprocessing grid-scale nuclear reactors. It even worked. Growth WHILE solving problems. But yeah, in France as elsewhere, that effort was and is tied to political will and electoral moods. And so now it's in jeopardy.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    > can't we progress without screwing up the planet? Probably yes. Can we progress without screwing the planet and still making the top 0.01% ever exponentially richer? Probably not. Here lies the rub.
hunter2_ 2y ago
Governments ought to incentivize efficient datacenter workloads, the same way they're incentivizing heat pumps over resistive heat. If they can give people tax credits for having efficient homes, they can give maintainers of large-scale software something in exchange for optimizing that software. I bet some very large percentage of data center electricity usage is directly attributable to absolute bloat, like VMs that could be containers, build pipelines that chug away endlessly producing nearly identical build artifacts every time, dumb polling that could utilize a smarter message queue push, neural nets that could be if statements, etc. -- where is the "LEED Gold" of software?
- erentz 2y ago
  That would be a nightmare to implement well and stifle innovation. Just put a proper cost on CO2 emissions, water usage, and land. That will naturally drive people to utilize those resources more efficiently.
mandmandam 2y ago
If anyone has an interest in Irish mythology and data centers, I'd highly recommend a listen of the Blindboy podcast's hot take on it: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/rivers-lakes-and-data-centres-in-irish-mythology/id1300577518?i=1000581630409 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/rivers-lakes-and-data-...
vonzepp 2y ago
Ireland live electrical generation https://www.eirgrid.ie/grid/real-time-system-information https://www.eirgrid.ie/grid/real-time-system-information
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
josefritzishere 2y ago
There may ultimatley need to be taxes on wasteful energy use. Less so on infastructure but very high on frivolous energy waste for things like crypto and AI as absurdly wasteful toys without meaningful use.

52 points by nemoniac 2y ago

I find this debate a bit odd. Climate change is a global issue. So moving these emissions out of Ireland so Ireland can reach it's targets doesn't help if those emissions mearly happen elsewhere in the world. In reality, there is two options either these data centers are simply not built, which isn't going to happen. Or rich countries such as Ireland, take it on to themselves to see taken on datacenters as a burden they must carry, coupled with increased renewables. With Ireland's wind on the west coast potential, this is something we must Especially with a temperant climate Moving the datacenters away from East coast Dublin to West coast. Galway in an ideal world would be also useful.

rakoo 2y ago
> either these data centers are simply not built, which isn't going to happen And this is why we will never solve the climate issue, because we still refuse to even entertain the idea of doing what we must do, what we must have been doing for decades but have refused to so it's going to be harder and harder to quit.
Symbiote 2y ago
Ireland's energy isn't particularly green, compared to nearby countries. The UK, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain and Portugal all have lower carbon emissions from CO₂. https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/IE https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/IE (set to "Yearly" view). Ireland only stopped burning peat for electricity last year!
- vonzepp 2y ago
  Nuclear being illegal in Ireland doesn't help.
  - lawlessone 2y ago
    I'd be ok with it. As long as nobody that's contracted to build housing or apartments here is involved. We'd somehow have meltdown before they laid the foundation.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Considering how things are built in Ireland that's a great thing for the world, trust me.
- dumbo-octopus 2y ago
  > stopped burning peat for electricity Thank goodness – save it for the Whisky!
  - cuSetanta 2y ago
    Pah, good irish Whiskey doesn't need to add dirt to add flavour, leave that to the Scotch!
creer 2y ago
Exactly. Furthermore, the fine article mentions 21% going to datacenters (of which, which fraction might be off-shoreable anyway?), and 18% to homes. Okay, that leaves 61% going to what? Which other industry uses have been going up or down? Then compounded by "If we already had lots of wind and lots of solar, it wouldn’t be a problem", which, as far as datacenters go probably misses the need for storage. What this is seems more of a meme article, linking presumably evil datacenters, with climate change, with "policy of low corporate taxation."
- lawlessone 2y ago
  >Okay, that leaves 61% going to what? Commercial maybe? I used to work in a Lidl and it was mentioned when they started automating their store lights inside and outside to turn off at night that it was taking a large load of the grid. Lot's offices, SME's etc? Warehouses? Not sure if they count as industrial or not.
  - creer 2y ago
    Of course. And metals smelters, and street lighting. Whatever. The point was that the fine article didn't care about that because it was a political hatchet job, rather than informing on how or why electric power is used in Ireland.
sandworm101 2y ago
>> moving these emissions out of Ireland so Ireland can reach it's targets doesn't help if those emissions mearly happen elsewhere They aren't being moved out. This is basic market forces, negotiation between provider and consumer. Ireland would be perfectly happy to host these datacenters should they be carbon neutral, perhaps by constructing their own green energy support system. The datacenters don't want to do that. They want cheap electricity. They want to be simple electricity consumers and thereby outsource any emissions issues to the local grid. Ireland has chosen not to take on that burden. If another country is willing, then so be it. Nobody should engage in a race-to-the-bottom on emissions. If these datacenters want to be in Ireland, they are free to foot the bill.
- gibolt 2y ago
  That is generally how utilities work. More demand == more money, which leads to more power plants / wind / solar to power it. Renewables are the cheapest to add by far, so should be the majority of new generation capacity.
glitchc 2y ago
I think others have already alluded to this, but the source of the electricity is the important bit. A datacenter running entirely on hydroelectricity is significantly greener than one running on coal. Moving the datacenter to a location where the source is as green as possible can have a big impact on emissions.
btbuildem 2y ago
Presumably you'd keep evicting them out of these tax havens until the only option they've got left is to innovate and optimize energy use, or heavily invest into renewable sources that don't have a huge heat/pollution footprint.
atoav 2y ago
Or 3: We need to think more for what those datacenters are used, make our programs more efficient, ...

torcete 2y ago

I'm old enough to remember the world without a constant presence of the internet and connectivity. I wonder how much energy these datacenters have actually saved thanks to technologies like google maps, email, online shopping, etc..

jajko 2y ago
The consumption now and in near future will be mostly driven by large AI models, to generate some crazy images, scam some people, and maybe also help individuals and companies a bit. I am not holding my breath on some overall positive effect. In past few years, it has been crypto mining ( maybe not in IR but globally definitely yes), I think we can all agree a pointless emotional fomo endeavor. That online shopping is also debatable, people often order low quality shit they don't really need because its ridiculously cheap. Manufacturing, transport, packaging, not so great for the planet. The days before the internet, I recall them too. Sure, you had to get to the shop, but I had way less clothing and overall everything and I kept it for longer (I am still very much an un-fashionate outlier of modern era but even for me its headed in bad direction).
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  > people often order low quality shit they don't really need because its ridiculously cheap Very much so. Cheap and easy. Just one click. Pure impulse. No thought.
SoftTalker 2y ago
I still get a visit from the mailman in his little truck six days a week. So email has saved nothing there. I get a lot more other deliveries too, but maybe I'm driving less to offset that? Haven't tracked this closely enough to say. Google Maps probably has saved some fuel in that I take fewer wrong turns and don't have to double back quite so often when I'm in an unfamiliar area. Again I just have my own impressions, but GPS tech in general probably is a net win in terms of energy saved.
- Nasrudith 2y ago

johndunne 2y ago

Ireland is upping its game to take advantage of it being a very ‘windy’ country. A 130 tonne flywheel, spinning inside a vacuum at 3000 rpm is set to offer some inertia to stabilise the grid, a common problem with wind power production. We’ll need this if we’re to meet power demands and achieve the Irish government’s lofty wind power ambitions. https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/stories/irelands-great-grid-stabilizer.html https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/stories/irelan...

keybored 2y ago

This is no match for the AI apologetic. - AI might have the solution to electricity over-consumption today - If not today then in the near future - If not in the near future then before the necessary timescale for climate change reversal - You have no reason to doubt such long time horizons; just look at the last few years and insert imagination for upcoming years EDIT: But this would be much worse if Ireland was running on something like coal.

drpgq 2y ago

Does Quebec have a massive number of datacentres? They're close the Eastern seaboard and have cheap electricity and relatively cold too.

ElectricSpoon 2y ago
Quebec does have a few. Amongst the issues is that scaling hydro power is hugely expensive, is riddled with red tape, and over all takes too long. Meanwhile you could build a datacenter and a solar farm in Texas and be up in 2 years.

rhdunn 2y ago

Data centres consuming electricity isn't the problem. The problem is running those data centres on fossil fuels. There has been an increased push to run the data centres on green technologies like solar, wind, and nuclear, e.g. [1]. Due to the machines being co-located makes it easier to do this compared to every website being hosted on machines spread over the country, where it is more likely that they will be run by fossil fuels. [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/rush-data-centers-creates-us-solar-hotspots-2024-02-22/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/rush-data-centers-cr...

Night_Thastus 2y ago
Another problem is water consumption. People don't realize it, but these data centers also consume incredible amounts of fresh water. There are a handful that run off of grey water, and it varies somewhat - but overall the consumption is enormous. It's a big problem for water-starved areas.
- rhplus 2y ago
  How do they consume the water exactly? If it’s just heat transfer, couldn’t it be reused once it passes through the data center? I would assume a small and cold country like Ireland could make good use of warm water, especially given its #2 ranking on tea consumption per capita! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tea_consumption_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tea_consu...
  - birken 2y ago
    A datacenter could consume a lot of water with evaporative cooling. I don't know how prevalent it is, but given how cheap and efficient evaporative cooling is, I'd guess datacenters use it a lot where possible (probably in combination with other cooling methods).
  - Night_Thastus 2y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJYSzc7YkY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJYSzc7YkY0

dmoo 2y ago

Ireland’s energy sources https://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/key-statistics/energy-use-overview/ https://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/key-st...

perihelions 2y ago

I miss the cultural era that was enthusiastic about economic growth. Most stories I see on HN, and other places, now react with reflexive condemnation of any kind of human industry. I worry about where this zeitgeist will lead us.

ddulaney 2y ago
I miss that era too. But the shift isn’t purely cultural: it’s an acknowledgement of the underlying reality that climate change is getting to be real bad. I worry about where a growth-at-all-costs mindset has lead us at least as much.
- creer 2y ago
  Has "at-all-costs" ever been the idea? Is it the only way?
convolvatron 2y ago
I'm confused as to why growth and progress as a species is tied inexorably to the mindlessly wasteful consumption of fossil fuels to the detriment of our own ability to live comfortably and feed ourselves. aren't we clever? can't we progress without screwing up the planet?
- creer 2y ago
  Right? That's the problem. There is nothing inexorable about it. France ages ago noticed a problematic reliance on fossile fuels and decided to actually solve that problem (for power and heating). That was a super ambitious program of building an entire, country-size industry capable of designing, building, fueling, running and reprocessing grid-scale nuclear reactors. It even worked. Growth WHILE solving problems. But yeah, in France as elsewhere, that effort was and is tied to political will and electoral moods. And so now it's in jeopardy.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  > can't we progress without screwing up the planet? Probably yes. Can we progress without screwing the planet and still making the top 0.01% ever exponentially richer? Probably not. Here lies the rub.

hunter2_ 2y ago

Governments ought to incentivize efficient datacenter workloads, the same way they're incentivizing heat pumps over resistive heat. If they can give people tax credits for having efficient homes, they can give maintainers of large-scale software something in exchange for optimizing that software. I bet some very large percentage of data center electricity usage is directly attributable to absolute bloat, like VMs that could be containers, build pipelines that chug away endlessly producing nearly identical build artifacts every time, dumb polling that could utilize a smarter message queue push, neural nets that could be if statements, etc. -- where is the "LEED Gold" of software?

erentz 2y ago
That would be a nightmare to implement well and stifle innovation. Just put a proper cost on CO2 emissions, water usage, and land. That will naturally drive people to utilize those resources more efficiently.

mandmandam 2y ago

If anyone has an interest in Irish mythology and data centers, I'd highly recommend a listen of the Blindboy podcast's hot take on it: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/rivers-lakes-and-data-centres-in-irish-mythology/id1300577518?i=1000581630409 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/rivers-lakes-and-data-...

vonzepp 2y ago

Ireland live electrical generation https://www.eirgrid.ie/grid/real-time-system-information https://www.eirgrid.ie/grid/real-time-system-information

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

josefritzishere 2y ago

There may ultimatley need to be taxes on wasteful energy use. Less so on infastructure but very high on frivolous energy waste for things like crypto and AI as absurdly wasteful toys without meaningful use.