Paul Murphy: Says Data Centres Are Driving Up Household Bills

It was recently reported that householders collectively paid around €454 million a year in capacity payments to data centres between 2007 and 2018. Since then it has more than doubled to €1 billion a year. With 11 more data centres under construction and applications for 30 more, this massive subsidy from ordinary people to data centres is only going to grow. Are you going to do nothing to stop data centres from pushing up household energy costs? The programme for Government acknowledges the increased energy cost pressures on households and businesses and are aiming to bring forward a number of measures to help contain energy costs. These include bringing forward taxation measures to help contain energy costs established across Government Energy Affordability Task Force to identify, assess and implement measures that will enhance energy affordability for households and businesses and carry out a review of the regulatory framework and increasing Ireland's overall supply and interdependence. The Government also recognises that data centres are critically important infrastructure for our modern economy and they provide the foundation for almost all online aspects of life. Our intent is to deliver a balanced approach to facilitating additional demand for energy while also ensuring that the competitiveness of our energy system. It should be noted that the core driver of high energy bills for Irish households, consumers and businesses in recent years has been high wholesale energy prices. Ireland is a price taker on international energy markets and the rise in wholesale gas prices since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the connections between gas and electricity prices has therefore had a serious impact on householders' energy costs. Delivery of modern flexible detachable generation capacity is important to both support a high renewable electricity system. This new modern capacity allows for the integration of large volume of wind and solar energy costs and solar energy projects that displace the need to run fossil fuel plants and thus reduce wholesale market prices. This capacity is procured to competitive auctions in the All-Ireland capacity remuneration mechanism. The most recent auction delivered a range of technologies including long duration storage and demand side responses with lessened Ireland's dependency on fossil fuel imports. That sounds like admission that the data centres are pushing up household energy prices. You might confirm that the government accepts that that is happening. That means that the crazy data centre policy of the government to allow big tech to come here and dump as much of this 21st century toxic waste as they can, is not only driving us further and further away from our climate goals, where the extra energy energy used by data centres is more than the extra renewable energy is more than the extra renewable energy in terms of wind power that we are adding to the grid since 2017, but is also driving household energy bills even higher. I mean this is madness in the short term, in the medium term, in the long term putting the profits of big tech corporations, the need for data centres which provide very, very few jobs, their massive guzzling of electricity and water and putting them before people's needs today and people's needs for an inhabitable planet. Thank you. Thank you, Deputy. I would not agree with your comment that it is creating a few jobs. I think the economy and the role that data centres play is really significant for large tech, for FDI, and we will continue to support our commitment to working with key stakeholders in that area, including the idea to identify and support new approaches. I think that is really important. We need to integrate large scale demand and sustainability into our energy system, but also we need to strike the balance. New data centre grid connections now are considered by a case by case basis by system operators. We are also in line with the CRU around the direction to system operators around data centre grid connection. And the CRU also is working with reprofiling the when and where these data centres can be established to ensure that the developments have access to renewable source. And the CRU has also completed its review of connections of large scale energy users and the Government is reviewing the CRU's proposed direction in this regard. Thank you, Mr Deputy. Thank you, Mr Deputy. Thanks. On the question of jobs, the Minister might confirm how many jobs are directly in data centres. Would I be correct in saying it is less than 3,000 jobs in data centres? And for a sector that is going to be using 30% of our electricity by around 2030, it is quite incredible in terms of the waste of electricity, the waste of water, the impact that has in terms of housing construction and other issues. We recently found out that by 2032, 9% of gas demand will be coming from just the 11 islanded data centres that are currently connected directly to the gas network. If the Government grants permission to the two dozen data centres that have applied for direct connection, that demand will quadruple to 36% of gas demand, burning fossil fuels directly to run data centres. So we are looking at an increasingly privatised energy system where we pay through the nose for data centres to burn gas in on-site gas power plants. That is linked to the discussion we have already had about LNG. This is likely going to be fuelled by fracked US LNG, of course. Minister? Thank you, Deputy. I think, Deputy, you need to consider that the tech investment that is going into these data centres, into the AI revolution, is leading the way around renewable energy solutions. And Ireland needs to be to the fore in this for large. We all know that AI will certainly unlock opportunities to produce solutions to energy and efficiency measures. And certainly we are committed and we have said that we will ensure that we have clear principles for sustained data centre development. And we did publish our statement around the role of data centres in Ireland's enterprise strategy. We want clear guidance for decision makers in the planning process, but we also want to encourage data centre sector to implement decarbonised energy solutions that not just increase efficiencies, but they are also decarbonising by design. And I think that's really important. And that is our preference. That's what we want to transition to, is that we have renewable energy source close to any of these new infrastructure developments. Thank you, Minister. Question?