‘When your back boiler grinds to a halt in a power cut next January or when your frail grandmother has to navigate the stairs with a torch, remember that the computer servers of Microsoft, Google and Meta will still be running in the air-conditioned halls of Grange Castle, Profile Park and Clonee. And your carbon tax will be paying to keep them cool.’ says Orla Nugent of Aontú, citing research by Paul Madden, Portumna-Loughrea Aontú Local Electoral Area Representative.
“You are likely to be told this is not true. You will be told that the data centres are running on Irish wind and solar, that the corporate sustainability reports are audited, that the Department of Climate has the situation in hand, and that the people raising the question are conspiracy theorists,” she said, adding that they will be told the global energy crisis is caused by the war in Iran.
“We won’t be told about the fact that Ireland has delivered just 0.5% of its 2030 offshore wind energy target. The 2-year delay to the Celtic Interconnector is said to be delayed due to “technical problems”.
“No data centre in Ireland is physically running on wind or solar at the moment its servers are drawing power. The “100 per cent renewable” claim that appears in every Big Tech sustainability report rests on a paper-certificate system called Guarantees of Origin, regulated under Article 19 of the EU Renewable Energy Directive and administered in Ireland by SEAI.
Companies can purchase GOs separately from the actual electricity and use these certificates to disguise the fact that they are actually drawing the energy from a fossil-fuel-heavy grid.
“Again, it will be the ordinary citizen who pays the price. When the grid is under stress next winter after a storm, a cold snap or even a generator trip — the load-shedding sequence that follows is not random. It is ordered. The high-voltage industrial customers with directly negotiated bilateral connection agreements sit near the top of that hierarchy. The hospitals and emergency services, as you would expect. sit near the top. The data centres, on contractually firm capacity with on-site backup generation, sit very near the top. The household at the end of a single rural feeder in Connemara, sits at the bottom.
“This is not a conspiracy and it is not even anyone’s specific decision to make. It is down to the way the contracts are written and the network is built. Microsoft and Google have signed enforceable commercial agreements with EirGrid that specify firm capacity, demand priority and contractual penalties for involuntary load shedding. Your household has a domestic supply agreement with an electricity retailer. The retailer has no contractual capacity priority on the network. The Group Water Scheme down the road has even less. When the system has to choose, the contracts do the choosing.
“At the same moment, in Grange Castle, Clonee, Profile Park and the wider Dublin cluster of data centres, the servers are humming along nicely. The grid feed has not failed because the contracts say it cannot. If the grid feed did fail, the on-site backup gas generators would start within seconds. The cooling systems are running.
“Microsoft is publishing AI inference, Meta is serving ads, Google is delivering Maps directions to drivers in countries that are not Ireland, Netflix is streaming to subscribers in Dublin 4. None of this stops. But your turkey and ham is most likely ruined.’It is a three card trick, and you are the victim,” concluded Nugent
