Energy Vacuums: Data Centres, Renewable Energy, and Rural Politics
By Patrick Brodie and Patrick Bresnihan
Data centres are one of the most important infrastructures powering contemporary digital economies. From e-commerce to cloud storage to streaming services to smart city technologies, our collective internet traffic is stored and circulated through these buildings. Ireland has in recent years, especially since the 2007-2008 financial crisis, become a hub for data centre construction. This construction has until now been concentrated in the Dublin region, supporting the city’s buzzing tech economy, driven by the foreign direct investment of US multinationals like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
Drawn to the country by the Industrial Development Agency (IDA) and promises of exceptionally low taxes, deregulated planning and lax data protection laws, these companies have set up shop and built expansive data centre campuses. Their activities in Ireland have been subject to increasing scrutiny from the EU for what are seen as unfair tax advantages.
Yet to be confronted, however, are their environmental impacts and far reaching influence in shaping the trajectory of Ireland’s energy futures. While these infrastructures power the everyday activities of the “fourth industrial revolution,” as data-driven economies have been called, the infrastructural systems fueling them have a much wider geography than those of big tech’s typical impact narratives.
Climate Impacts
Article originally published in Issue 2 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:
Data centres are energy vacuums. To keep their rows of servers from overheating, they require enormous amounts of energy for cooling. Ireland’s relatively low year-round temperatures, along with the damp and wind, supposedly means that cooling requires much less energy than in other places. However, this has been widely acknowledged as “corporate spin,” distracting from the externalities and carbon footprint of data centres.
EirGrid has projected that by 2027 as much as 31% of Ireland’s electricity could be consumed by data centres. Ireland’s electricity is still primarily powered by fossil fuels (70% gas, coal and peat). The state has already missed its 2020 EU targets for renewables and looks set to miss its ambitious targets of 70% renewable energy by 2030.
Green Transition
When confronted with the energy footprint of data centres, even critics often resign themselves to green alternatives. This familiar logic of substitution (fossil-fuels replaced by renewable energy sources) tends to underpin ecological thinking from both the left and the right. The logic of “sustainability,” in which left-leaning thinkers also often participate, fails to imagine true alternatives to the extractive operations of multinational corporations. In the case of data centres and their energy footprints, such a logic not only feeds into the seeming inevitability of big data, big tech, and the infrastructures required to sustain them, but also obscures the urban/rural divide which technological fixes would reproduce.
AWS, the largest provider of data storage in Ireland (and the world), has pledged to have its global operations 100 per cent powered by renewable energy by 2025. This dovetails with Ireland’s commitment to quadruple renewable energy capacity by 2030. In Ireland, part of this will come from Corporate Power Purchase Agreements (CPPAs), which are direct price agreements between companies and energy providers. This means that companies receive a guaranteed (low) rate on their energy costs directly from the energy provider. The idea is to incentivize renewable energy projects by offering the stability of long-term corporate contracts, allowing the state to advertise new renewable energy percentages while private energy companies are able to secure profits. However, it also means that new renewable energy does not go to homes, but rather directly to energy-hungry corporate infrastructures.
CPPAs have, so far, been particularly prevalent in the wind energy sector, another largely privatised, commercial sector,as a quick scroll through the Irish Wind Energy Association can reveal. Wind farms have been expanding across the country’s rural regions, oftentimes with significant local objection. AWS has already signed contracts with wind farms in Cork, Donegal, and Galway.
In the recent Climate Action Plan, the state signals that up to 15% of renewable energy capacity will be supported by CPPAs. The state promotes CPPAs as a means of shifting the cost of renewables from the households to corporate energy consumers. As the argument goes, demand will influence supply—if companies need renewable energy, more will be built, changing the energy make-up of the grid. They are also, unsurprisingly, promoted by the tech industry, allowing them to appear as the answer to a problem (energy/climate) they are in part responsible for.
But while tech’s CPPAs with wind farms are frequently reported as “investment” by the national presses in Ireland, this is not the case. It is a corporate contract instrumentalized across the public grid, where a company is allowed to effectively monopolize future renewable energy capacity by using public infrastructure. With the state conceding that future energy and climate strategies are “heavily influenced” by the ongoing expansion of data centres, this clearly complicates any climate-centred efforts. It is ultimately the energy needs of multinational tech companies that are accommodated by new renewable energy generation, especially wind.
Rural Expansion
Companies looking to develop data centres will also have to deal with the saturation of the energy grid in and around Dublin, which is currently accommodating over 60 data centres. To date, there have already been proposals for data centres in Athenry, Arklow, Drogheda, Ennis, Killala, Letterkenny, Portlaoise, and Shannon, likely among others that are in the works behind the scenes. Data centres, like wind farms, will be increasingly located in rural regions.
For example, Bord na Móna, as part of their “just transition” strategy out of peat extraction and burning, have proposed holdings across the country as places to develop these data and energy hubs. Instead of re-wetting the bogs to offset the climate impacts of draining, cutting, and burning them in the first place, many former industrial turf-cutting sites are becoming sites of new industrial-scale development. At Cúil na Móna, a bogland site outside of Portlaoise, the company hopes to develop a renewable biogas plant, which they hope will power a soon-to-follow data centre developed by a multinational.
While typically data centres have gone places with already-available energy and other infrastructural capacities, this is a case in which a company is planning to build energy infrastructure to attract new data centres. These, like the AWS contracted wind farms, aim to create a circular renewable energy system built out to power data centres.
Global Resonances
Energy considerations are always at the forefront of data centre development. As familiarity with these demands has grown, and data centre companies have increasingly speculated on territories across the world, territories have tended to advertise robust and abundant energy capacities. This is especially true in places with existing renewable capacity, as companies must demonstrate their “green” credentials for publicity and to get past the regulators. Iceland, for example, is a destination as a result of both its “natural” climate and its geothermal energy generation. Québec is also a growing data centre hub, the result of cheap and abundant hydroelectric generation by semi-state provider Hydro Québec.
However, once you begin to unravel the politics of even renewable energy, you find a deeply extractive history and set of logics. In Québec, for example, Hydro Québec has historically displaced indigenous communities on land they have requisitioned for their projects, also massively disrupting important local ecosystems and water supplies.
Ireland is also tied into global systems of extraction and exploitation by its facilitation of the tech industries. Whether the global supply chains of Amazon or Apple, or the data extractions of Facebook and Google, Ireland is implicated in a geopolitics of value based on destruction, displacement, and exploitation—whether in terms of digital waste or social media content moderation labour outsourced to the Global South, the racialized dimensions and surveillance of digital technologies, or the expansion of extractive activities like lithium mining elsewhere to support smart systems.
The simultaneous and seductive development of “renewable” and “smart” systems like those supported by data centres serves to occlude major global implications. Not only this, states and corporations tend to promote narratives that centre the social responsibility of private industry, while marginalizing perspectives that disrupt the “progression” of these economies, such as rural communities objecting to large-scale projects.
Local Politics
In Ireland, there are a number of places in which these politics are already playing out, often in formations unfamiliar to theories and tactics of the urban left. One very specific development is anti-wind farm activism. While sometimes expressing rural NIMBYism, or at worst a conspiratorial ethos of Ireland’s burgeoning far right, it is imperative that the left take seriously the tactics and demands of rural movements against large infrastructures. Actively engaging in them as they continue to develop may help to connect localised opposition to energy infrastructures to the wider, uneven policies and economies of big tech, finance, and energy.
In one example, the Finn Valley Wind Action Group in Donegal has brought an appeal against Meenbog Wind Farm, which entered a CPPA with AWS. In statements to the media, the Group highlight the dubious nature of the planning process, the emptiness of statements about tech companies’ 100% renewable commitments, the huge drain that data centres have on the national grid (which must be backed up by conventional power plants and on-site gas generators anyway), and local impacts on bird populations. The Group evidently connects different scales and operations of power shaping their landscapes and futures.
The Group’s ongoing planning appeal did not prevent AWS from announcing it was set to purchase energy from the wind farm, nor Leo Varadkar hailing this as evidence of the tech sector’s commitment to the low-carbon transition. Clearly, little community consultation had occurred before the government and AWS communicated the details of this deal to the public.
Anti-wind campaigns utilize an existing repertoire of tactics and practices, including savvy knowledge of the planning system. While these sorts of objections in rural Ireland have tended, across history, to be tied to specific and localized grievances, anti-wind activism has become networked across the country. Wind Aware Ireland, a non-profit endorsed by a consortium of localized groups, attempts to foster greater conversation about the sustainability of wind projects as they are developed in communities. In spite of the professed “non-political” alignment of the group, it is encouraging to see cooperation and support across such a diverse set of land interests and stakeholders.
While remaining mostly in the planning stages, there are also a few cases of anti-data infrastructure activism to draw on. A recent dispute, led by a Clare Island fisherman, railed against the AE-Connect-2 transatlantic fibre optic cable, partially funded by Facebook and Google and meant to land in Lecanvy, County Mayo. Reportedly, the locals on Clare island asked for a spur on the cable to provide the island with high-speed broadband, as it was passing over their seabed. When the company refused, they decided to dispute the project. Across a variety of increasingly (and it would appear intentionally) outlandish claims about the dangers of subsea cables for fishing, the locals managed to put a wrench in the project’s gears, to the point that it probably will not go ahead.
Such politics thwart left/right distinctions on the political spectrum, let alone schisms within strands of the left that tend to inform how and on what bases political groups organize. Legacies of much longer histories and politics, rural movements tend to respond to local needs and grievances more so than wider environmental concerns. But these have often been the most effective movements for materially objecting to the expansion of extractivist resource logics and corporate control over land, water, and energy.
These are not naïve struggles, however disconnected from a wider politics. They are the result of years of savvy manoeuvring around the intrusions of the state and capital that have tended to leave these places disconnected from infrastructure and economic growth. When you are used to infrastructural abandonment, or infrastructures that pass through but do not materially benefit your community, you would not view the state as a formation that can or will provide the things that you need. Things are achieved through local coalition and opportunistic politics.
The state tends to step in and try to de-regulate such disputes out of existence. For example, in response to the Apple in Athenry saga, the Government proposed in 2017 an amendment to the Planning and Infrastructure Act of 2000 which classifies data centres as “critical infrastructure,” granting them access to fast-track planning without local objections.
Being a pain in the ass, delaying things to the point of exhaustion, does often seem to work, at least in the sense that it forces the state and capital to react and show their hand.
The left needs to take seriously the material objections and grievances of local groups in rural contexts, because these are ultimately the places through which big tech and big energy will operate in the years to come. As our research has often shown, this has been the case for some time, and it is only now that this assemblage is coming to the surface. Shifting focus away from easy narratives of sustainability and to more difficult questions of de-growth may better connect the global interests of the left to the local grievances of rural communities.