RDS, Merrion Rd, Dublin 23rd November 2023: From 12:30 pm to 2pm, Extinction Rebellion Ireland (XRI) activists staged a lively protest at the main gates of the RDS while the Data Centres Ireland exhibit and conference took place inside. The centrepiece of the “No More Data Centres - Power Communities, not Big Tech” protest was the mythological Ériu, Goddess of Ireland, pleading against the plunder of her resources by Data Centres.
XRI objects to data centres on the basis of their huge energy and water use, the fact that they already use as much electricity as all urban households and that usage is forecast to double by 2030, the threat they pose to reaching greenhouse gas reduction targets and the fact that there’s little transparency around the types of data services being provided and what categories of customers these services are provided for.
Data centres used 18% of Ireland's electricity in 2022 - the same as all urban households. And their electricity usage is set to double by 2030. And each data centre has a water demand equivalent to a large Irish town. Some studies estimate that only 19% of data stored is business critical.
Protestor Seán Loughran of Balgriffin, who is active with both XRI and Fingal One Future said,
“With the climate crisis spiralling into catastrophe, it is madness to let profit-driven Big Tech accelerate our energy demand with these data centres that store mostly frivolous data. Data Centres should never have been allowed without proper regulation being in place first.”
The government has set a target of reaching 80% of electricity generation from renewables by 2030. This will be challenging and made more so by the fact that data centres are causing electricity demand to rise sharply.
Angela Deegan of XRI said,
“It seems like we’re always missing our climate targets and it’s heart-breaking. By letting electricity demand skyrocket through the rampant construction of data centres, the target of 80% electricity from renewables by 2030 gets much harder to achieve than it already is. Even worse is that when the big tech companies behind data centres were told they couldn’t connect to the grid in the Dublin area any more, because of supply constraints, they just applied instead to get gas connections so they could have their own private gas-fired power stations. And it’s looking like we’re going to have up to 11 of these fossil-gas-guzzling data centres, which is insane.”
She continued,
“We need a ban on new data centres. Unfettered data centre growth is what Big Tech wants, regardless of what it means for energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions. We must call a halt to it now.”
-end-