Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

Isn't this a similar issue of doctors raised by taxpayers money doing hair transplant and cosmetic surgeries instead of working in much less profitable hospitals with sick people or European scientists and engineers risen by public education working in American tech companies or super rich people from all over the world buying all the homes in London which is valuable not because of its resources but because of the people there and now causing housing problems?

They all have the same issues:

1) Pricing that doesn't account for externalities.

2) Those who bear the consequences are not those who reap the benefits

My electricity costs 34 cent per Kw/h and I can’t afford solar panels or a renovation to air to water heating while the government insists we shouldn’t use oil / coal anymore nor logs or turf to heat our homes

That is about 3% of California's total energy usage

Or about 11,000 GWh which is about 4% of California which means without the theatrics:

California has 4x more data centers than Ireland.

California: ~810 watts per person. (278,000 GWh / 39.4 million people)

Ireland: ~690 watts per person. (32,000 GWh / 5.3 million people)

We have air conditioning and that may be why we use more POWAH

And got electricity price hike last year, and now few weeks ago again, from ~25c kwh, to around 35c kwh! They say its reliance on fossil fuels. Not just that, think Ireland has one of the most expensive broadbands in the EU!

Is there a snowball effect where a big AWS region attracts more usage? Those snowballs are more significant in smaller countries?

Ireland consumes roughly 40 TWh per year, that’s less than the production of four EPR reactors or two times Hinkley Point C.

The country could easily solve its electricity problems with nuclear power. They can ask South Korea for help who built four reactors in UAE with 12 years which now provide 25% of the country’s electricity.

Are we allowed post masto links? I'm an Irish techie. I shot a video about this. Sorry about the camera shake:

https://mastodon.ie/@handi/116900076149521593

A few years ago I was reading a recruitment report and was surprised to learn that Ireland is a large source of data scientists, so it’s no surprise really

I read this as 'Irish Dancers now guzzle....'

I'm sure they work up a sweat but probably not on the same order of magnitude

This article could have been a stacked bar chart with a caption. Maybe even should have been. Matter of fact, here you go people: https://imgur.com/a/s9KZRuQ

Would have appreciated a bit more context too. This sounds very serious, but how does it compare in energy use per land area across countries? Or in absolute use? Maybe Ireland is just small? Maybe not very densely populated? Maybe efficient in its energy use otherwise? Maybe all of these?

I also find the tone interesting. It's as if there was a threshold being approached [0], or if the rate was accelerating. But it's the opposite:

> Their share rose to 23 percent in 2025 after passing 20 percent in 2023 and 14 percent in 2021

So from 2021 to 2023 (+2 yrs) the jump was 6pp, and from 2023 to 2025 (also +2 yrs) was 3pp... meaning the expansion rate in usage share has slowed to a half? I could easily imagine a similar article celebrating. Once again though, visual: https://imgur.com/a/0eR3bl6 -- using the actual raw data instead. Basically what the article should have been.

And what's with the random timeskips for the absolute data? Here's 2015, 2019, 2024, 2025, but not 2023 (only %), not 2022, not 2021 (only %), etc. So annoying. If we're throwing numbers around, then let's do it properly gents. The data is all available ^^.

[0] Not only is there of course no threshold to speak of, the entire narrative framing is up in the air. Why does it matter how much electricity DCs use (in absolute or relative terms), and who does it matter to? Ireland's electricity use energy mix was recorded to be a suspiciously tight majority "green" in 2024 at least: https://www.iea.org/countries/ireland/electricity - could use all the energy they wanted if it was green energy, no?

Canada seems better positioned for datacenters since they can power them locally with a multitude of options and not impact the local grid.

Ireland has been a data center hub for decades - especially thanks to the IDA successfully wooing Microsoft back in 2007 [0], and it helped played a role in helping Ireland partially recover from the AIB and housing collapse back in 2008 and become the tech hub it is today. Heck, it was the corneestone of the IDA's tech FDI policy back then [1].

Heck, Google itself only expanded in Ireland back in the 2000s in large part because they worked on acquiring Colt to build their European CoLo in Ireland, and data centers now represent around 18% of Ireland's total GVA [2].

[0] - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/hyperscalers/microsoft-p...

[1] - https://www.siliconrepublic.com/science/ireland-has-the-pote...

[2] - https://www.iiea.com/blog/data-centres-in-ireland-the-state-...

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Guzzles or sensibly sips?

They chose to add the word "guzzle". They could have just written "Irish datacenters now use 23% of the country's electricity". But they made the editorial decision to add in "guzzle". What's the word for this type of propaganda, where they add in some sort of adjective that wasn't needed, in order to prime the reader on how to think/feel, rather than just objectively reporting the facts? What are the odds that the content of the article is objective and factual, given the decisions they made with the headline?

Ah the old "country's worth of electricity" comparison... Keep in mind that Ireland's entire electricity needs could be covered by a one nuclear power plant (3.8 GW with 4 reactors). IOW, you could offload all Irish datacenters by connecting them to a single nuclear power reactor (~900 MW), a small building that has a footprint of under 50 x 50 meters for the reactor, and another of 100 x 50 meters for the generator.