Cllr: Stop data centres ‘popping up like mushrooms’
Ireland already has too many data centres and should halt all further grid connections to such centres, Cork County Council has heard.
At Monday’s full council meeting, Social Democrats councillor Isobel Towse urged that an immediate national moratorium on grid connections for data centres should be implemented nationwide.
In her motion, she asked that the council write to the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) calling for an immediate halt.
Cllr Towse claimed that Ireland already has ten times as many data centres per capita as New York and that the country simply doesn’t need them all.
“We need to halt grid connections and allow time to examine fully what a sustainable level of data centres would be and set out a plan for the future,” she told the chamber.
According to a report published by Maynooth University last month, the total water footprint of data centres in Ireland was approximately 125.9 million litres of water a day in 2025, with a total annual footprint of 46 billion litres. This is equivalent to the total direct water consumption of 340,600 homes.
Cumulatively over the period 2015-2025, the total water footprint, including direct and indirect water consumption, of the Irish data centre sector is an estimated 254.7 billion litres of water.
Cllr Towse said: “Data centres consumed 23% of our metered electricity last year, and EirGrid says this will be over 30% by 2030, and I think that's conservative.”
In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, the report noted that, at 620 tonnes of CO₂ per direct full-time worker employed in data centres in Ireland, data centre employment is over 880 times more carbon intensive than a job in the health sector, 590 times more intensive than employment in the education sector, and nearly 400 times more intensive than retail employment. More broadly, data centre employment is 42 times more intensive than the average job in the Irish economy.
“We carry on allowing them to pop up like mushrooms,” said Cllr Towse. “Data centres make electricity more expensive for everyone by driving up demand, which leads to higher wholesale prices. The CRU data from August shows that 1 in 7 households are in arrears on their electricity bills.
“This is on top of already sky-high electricity costs, the highest in Europe.”
Cllr Towse’s motion received much support from elected members across the chambre with Labour’s Ronan Sheehan describing the request to halt grid connections as a “reasonable task” for the CRU.
He said: “We cannot have the situation where significant electricity demand is being connected while other users are waiting for infrastructure, or where communities have been asked to accept increasing pressure on the electricity system itself.”
In response to Cllr Towse’s motion, Cork County Council’s Assistant Chief Executive Michael Lynch noted that the Government statement on the role of data centres in Ireland’s Enterprise Strategy 2022 outlines that new data centres must provide generation and/or storage capacity to support their electricity demand.
He said data centres are required to meet at least 80% of their annual electricity demand from additional renewable electricity projects located in Ireland.
“This introduces self-sustaining elements to data centres,” said Mr Lynch. “Cork County Council’s Development Plan 2022-2028 is aligned with the national and regional policy position regarding data centre development. The Plan supports data centres in appropriate locations while requiring consideration of infrastructure capacity, energy demand, grid capacity, renewable energy sources, environmental impacts, and the cumulative effects of development.”