Feeding an insatiable monster: Data centres in Ireland with Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie
Article originally published in Issue 6 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:
Edited by Diarmuid Flood
The last few months have seen a renewed focus on the disastrous environmental impact of data centres. People Before Profit introduced a Bill placing a moratorium on their erection which was voted down by the government, and protests against their continuing construction were held across Ireland. A Maynooth academic, Dr Patrick Bresnihan, warned the Oireachtas in September that data centres could use 70% of Ireland’s electricity by 2030.[1]
The following is an excerpt from a Rupture Radio interview from September with Dr Bresnihan and his colleague Dr Patrick Brodie in which they discuss the function of data centres in modern capitalist societies as well as their effect on energy consumption. They previously wrote about the environmental costs of data centres in our second issue, and revisiting this subject is timely given the developments since. Beginning by outlining why Ireland has become a hub for data centre construction, they discuss how this contributes to the infrastructural abandonment of rural areas, and how this relates to Ireland’s dependence on foreign direct investment and status as a tax haven.
Patrick Bresnihan: [T]here's no doubt that [foreign direct investment] is a huge attraction and has been one of the main strategies of the state in its economic development since the 1960s. [But] you have to look beyond just that.
There are the material assets, resources, and infrastructures that the Irish state has built out and provided for heavy manufacturing. It's not just headquarters of major multinationals, but it was [also] manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, chemical manufacturing, and then into hardware manufacturing in the 1980s. Before you had the likes of Apple and Google, you had Microsoft in Maynooth. Before that you had others that were in Galway, for example, which was a bit of a hub for hardware.
People like Sharae Deckard, who's in UCD has written a really great article on this around Ireland's neoliberal ecological regime, [which] has a much longer history going back to colonial times. In terms of foreign direct investment, you're talking about the likes of Pfizer locating in Cork in the 1970s and building a whole new water treatment plant [which] resulted in Ringaskiddy having water shortages.
The contradictions between the public good and the provision of infrastructures for citizens and corporate needs and the provision of infrastructure for those needs has a much longer history. It's really important to situate what's happening today [with] data centres in that longer history because we have to really understand what we're up against. We're talking about Ireland's political economy, the institutions, cultures, and structures of the state which are so oriented towards foreign direct investment. That means that trying to obstruct data centres is just the latest point to try to disrupt or block the much more foundational character of the Irish state and the way in which the economy functions. I think that's really important to understand what we are up against.
Patrick Brodie: The establishment of data centres really starts to take off at the same time as the origin point of what people in the industry call the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’. So 2007-2008 is when you really start to see an expansion of tech companies, which were largely already based in Ireland from [the] Celtic Tiger days. [These companies] began to realise that Ireland was where they could build the data centres which were increasingly required.
There was then a general shift towards off-site, outsourced, data management schemes. [Data rooms] started to be outsourced and centralised within large scale co-location data centres for hyperscalers like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, cloud and social media companies. In Ireland it appeared like a natural progression of tech manufacturing to tech services to cloud computing.
Patrick Bresnihan: It's good to ground this stuff in examples. One of the sites that I've been to is in Killala in North Mayo. In Killala there's an industrial area that would have been zoned probably in the late 50s / early 60s for industrial activities and manufacturing. It was used to attract Asahi, which was a Japanese company that manufactured chemical threads used in packaging. Asahi established there in the 70s and was there for maybe 20 years. When they moved to Killala it was the biggest investment of a Japanese company outside of Japan up to that point. [It] provided employment for hundreds of people and transformed the area, including the infrastructure where the treatment plant was built. This was the FDI of that particular period.
That all went bust in the 90s. We know the bigger picture - a lot of this heavy manufacturing is outsourced somewhere else, cheaper labour, more lax environmental regulations, whatever. So it closed and lots of jobs were lost. That site has effectively been empty except for small local companies that have used it for recycling. The Mayo County Council, which basically manages that site, isn't looking for another big entity to come in and take over.
We're now in the era of data centres [which] are seen as big industrial installations that can somehow fill the gap that’s been left by these industrial manufacturing facilities. So they are, because that's the only policy the Irish state has for the likes of Killala. There's no other kind of indigenous development, nothing else. They're basically being driven towards trying to catch the attention of data centre providers, mostly in the US, and say 'come here, come here, come here.'
So they're trying to get them to come and locate in Killala. The problem is they don't provide any jobs. So what you have is this huge site that's been zoned for industrial activity. Any heavy industry that provides jobs is gone and won't come back. But data centres might come there, which is a big building that uses loads of energy. It's ugly in an industrial way, but it's going to provide a couple of construction jobs in the short term.
““They’re popping
up everywhere,
because it’s the best
there is when you’ve
got a state that’s not
doing other kinds of
development.””
I talked to somebody in the Council who's trying to develop this as a project going forward. He was completely honest about the fact that there wouldn't be jobs but it would be something. It's some investment, and that's what you're dealing with. That's why they're popping up everywhere, because it's the best there is when you've got a state that's not doing other kinds of development.
One thing lobbyists will argue is that data centres are using renewable energy, either on site or through their funding of it on the energy grid. How do you respond to claims like this?
Patrick Bresnihan: I think there's no point in being overly polemic and reducing what is a complex set of relations between tech companies and developments in the energy sector particularly around renewables. These things are developing quite quickly. I think that it's sometimes a little bit disingenuous or naive to simply say 'greenwashing'. Obviously, a lot of it is greenwashing. But what do we mean by greenwashing? There is no doubt that tech companies are looking to invest in or get their names involved in renewable energy projects including in Ireland.
That is largely because of pressure that has been put on them since ten years ago. I think Greenpeace’s Clicking Green Report was the first major report looking at the energy footprint of big tech companies. It really shone a light on the fact that these things weren't just a cloud. They weren't just ethereal.
Off the back of that and other pressures they've all been competing to outgreen each other. It's another terrain on which they can compete and so they’ve all come out with claims to be 100% renewable by whatever date. Amazon is claiming [by] 2026, which is a very short time. Quite a few of them have signed up to this ‘zero emissions charter’.
In Ireland, the main way in which tech companies are showing their commitment to renewable energy is through Corporate Power Purchase Agreements, [or] CPPAs. These are a central part of government policy to fund renewable energy. They hope that by 2030 35% of new renewable energy capacity will be financed through CPPAs.
Through this they can directly invest in renewable energy by buying up energy over usually a 15 year period. That's how long the lease is for. They basically [enter] a contract or an arrangement with a wind energy developer and say we guarantee that for 15 years you will get this minimum price for your energy. So it's not that they directly, in a physical sense, get the electricity generated from the wind farm. What they promise is a minimum price. So that wind farm, like every energy provider, basically goes onto the energy market, and tries to sell its energy at the highest price it can.
More often than not, it might not go down to a minimum price. But if it does, the company that has the contract with the CPPA, let's imagine Facebook or Amazon, guarantees that it will come in and make sure that it gets the lowest price for every watt that it provides. So that company is not directly building wind energy capacity or a new energy capacity.
It's not like direct investment. It's just this price guarantee. And there's lots of questions around that, the first one being if Amazon or Facebook wasn't providing that financial guarantee, would that wind farm be built anyway? There's a strong argument that it would because of the current market for renewable energy. There is the state rest scheme already which is effectively the same thing [except] the state comes in and guarantees a minimum price for new energy projects. As we go forward in time, it's going to be more and more the case that these renewable energy projects are going to get off the ground because there are more and more investors who are eager to invest in these projects and they are commercially viable.
The other aspect of it is even if this wind energy capacity was being built that wouldn't otherwise be built because of the financial guarantees of Amazon or Facebook or Google, the amount of renewable energy that they have so far invested is in a very small fraction of what their data centres in Ireland currently demand. So in that sense, it is more symbolic than it is a realistic dent in their energy demands.
So in that case, there is definitely an amount of greenwashing, certainly in the extent of media attention that they get for these projects, and it doesn't at all equate to any balancing of their energy amounts.
Patrick Brodie: The CPPA system is a way to ensure that there is funding for new renewable energy projects. But ultimately, if it gets to a point where all of those new renewable energy projects are being funneled into one industry and in this industry, the general energy use of the country isn't changing except for the growth of this industry, then ultimately you're left with all new renewable energy capacity going to the growth of data centre energy demands.
Another argument that's brought up by industry professionals quite a lot is they say that data centre energy efficiency is constantly being optimised to keep up with the growth in the technologies and infrastructures themselves. And yet in Ireland if you look at the graphs of energy use versus the growth of data center energy demand, it's essentially directly correlated.
But I do think that it can be used as spin, and it is used to spin for the industry, because ultimately, there isn't really a commitment or responsibility being demonstrated if this is only to feed their growth. It's not as though there's going to be any spare energy from, for example, Amazon's corporate power purchase agreement with the Meenbog Wind Farm in Donegal as it ultimately makes up a fraction of the energy that Amazon is using in Ireland. An incredibly small fraction.
And yet you see this heralded as evidence of their responsibility [with] Leo Varadkar making a personal statement when he was Taoiseach heralding their climate responsibility and their commitment to Ireland. Yet, if you look at the actual percentage of their operations that are being constituted by these wind farms, it's an incredibly small fraction. And at the minute they probably have several data centres under construction in Ireland between Dublin and Drogheda.
““Every data centre that is built is like a big hole in the boat, and everyone else is being told to carry the burden of reducing their carbon footprint.””
Patrick Bresnihan: An analogy that I've heard is that it's like trying to bail out a boat that has holes appearing in it. Every data centre that is built is like a big hole in the boat, and everyone else is being told to carry the burden of reducing their carbon footprint. Get electric vehicles, retrofit their houses, cycle more, fly less.
There's so much onus on individuals who don't have the resources to reduce their carbon footprint, while at the same time there’s a green light for the expansion of this industry which is adding X amount of emissions to the grid. So there is a fundamental contradiction. Which again comes back to that point I made about Ringaskiddy water plant in the 70s which caused water shortages for citizens but there was water supply for Pfizer.
I think that’s what's happening with the data centres and the climate and energy. The contradictions are starting to become more tangible, and they're coming to the surface, and hopefully, that can be articulated in some progressive way and be linked to a different kind of politics. That doesn't just put all its faith in some technological solution that’s going to come at some point down the road which is, as far as I'm concerned, not realistic.
Notes
Tommy Meskill, ‘Data centres could use 70% of Ireland’s grid by 2030 - expert’, RTÉ, 28 September 2021, https://www.rte.ie/news/politics/2021/0928/1249505-data-centres-oireachtas/.
The rest of this interview can be found at https://bit.ly/3dnsVtR or at the following QR code: