Ireland’s data centers are an economic lifeline. But environmentalists say they’re wrecking the planet

If approved, it would be one of the country’s biggest. A Dublin-based company called Art Data Centres Ltd. submitted the planning application for the center in July. Not much is known about the company, which was set up in 2018. Its director and secretary have been involved in more than 6,500 other listed Irish companies — over 3,000 of which have since closed, according to the Irish company records checking site SoloCheck. CNN was unable to establish contact with Art Data Centres and its representatives did not respond to requests for comment.It is not clear what the data center will be used for, nor if other larger tech companies could ultimately be involved.The €1.2 billion ($1.4 billion) investment is likely to be welcomed by the Irish government, which has included large data centers as part of its “strategic infrastructure development,” despite concerns growth in data centers could undermine the country’s commitment to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030.Ireland’s temperate climate helps reduce the amount of energy needed to cool servers, but its corporate tax rates — some of the lowest in the world — and friendly regulatory environment are what makes it so attractive to big companies, such as Google (GOOGL), Meta (FB) (Facebook), Intel (INTC) and Apple (AAPL), who all have their European headquarters here.Despite that favorable climate, Ireland’s data centers eat up a significant amount of electricity, leaving how their operations square with the country’s ambitious climate goals in question. According to state-owned power operator EirGrid, they are on track to have consumed 17% of power generated in Ireland in 2021.

EirGrid notes that Irish data centers are so energy-needy that over the past four years, the power they required was the equivalent of adding a half a million homes to the grid.Host in Ireland, a trade group that promotes Ireland “as the data hosting centre of Europe,” said in a 2021 report that the number of completed data centers had grown by 25% between May 2020 and May 2021. And, cumulatively, data centers contributed 1.85% of the country’s carbon emissions last year, Host in Ireland estimates.As more centers are built across the country, environmental advocates fear Ireland’s climate targets are slipping further out of reach.In response, a spokesperson for the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications told CNN in a statement that the government’s Climate Action Plan 2021 “sets out a suite of actions to address electricity demand from data centres,” which includes a review of its strategy on data centers “to ensure that growth of such users can only happen in alignment with sectoral emissions ceilings and renewable energy targets.”When tech came to townLocal authorities in Ennis are advocating for the data center’s construction, a key project of the town’s strategic economic plan. Developers say the center will create 250 permanent jobs and 1,200 temporary ones during construction, while also helping to diversify the tech sector away from Dublin, thereby reducing pressure on the capital’s power grid.Ennis resident Pears Hussey told CNN that he would much prefer to see investment used “to ready and buffer us against the worst impact of climate, and to transition us into a more sustainable equitable society — rather than seeing huge areas of land, public infrastructure, and our national grid being devoted to multinational corporations.” Still, Flynn is optimistic about the development, citing the economic potential it could bring, and not just data center jobs. Flynn hopes that this center might entice tech companies to expand their operations to Ennis, given the town’s proximity to the River Shannon and the Atlantic — home to a burgeoning offshore wind farm industry. An EirGrid draft proposal supports that idea, saying that large power users like data centers could be positioned in the west and the south, close to sources of clean energy generation, to take pressure off the eastern grid and prepare for 2030 emissions targets.The Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications spokesperson said that “energy demand as a whole, including from data centres, will be expected to operate within sectoral emissions ceilings,” and that “data centres that locate close to renewable energy, bring their own renewable energy, are highly flexible and include some element of storage provide an opportunity for significantly lower carbon emissions.””If you have your renewable energy on the western seaboard, why not have the data storage where the renewable energy is and encourage tech clusters to locate along it?” Flynn said.But Hussey, the Ennis resident, doesn’t share that optimism.”It doesn’t feel very democratic that a small town of Ennis can have such a huge development with such a huge impact on our efforts to meet our climate targets kind of hoisted upon us, when the impact is going to go on for generations and generations,” he said.”For every step forward Ennis takes, the power plants will take us two or three steps back.”