A Shortage of Drinking Water and Electricity in Ireland

Firstly a lot of this is hype. In terms of water Dublin needs cheap water, and the best way identified is to get cheap water from Shannon and use it in Dublin. This is needed with and without data centres. All other water options are more expensive.

In terms of electricity if Russia turns off the gas then all countries will suffer at peak times. In terms of peak shortages there is plans to disconnect data centres if needed, and data centres all have back up generators. There is plans to run a power cable to France under the sea but that's more to add or sell green power and haggle better prices with the UK. There was also a court case about temporary winter capacity with the grid being prevented from some planned additional winter capacity. We also have various power stations that can go down for months due to faults or big refurbishment. Typically we have used gas at peak times each day as it was cheap.

In the real world it's mostly all talk and we won't have any outages. There are various vested interest groups that like to claim the problem is critical, such as newspapers looking for a story.

Server rooms can be air/water/oil cooled

Evaporative cooling.

Draw hot air over water and the heat will cause some of the water to evaporate and rise and thus leave less heat in the remaining air.

You then only need to manage the humidity of the air - which you can do by chilling water in offpeak hours (lower electrical demand) and then drawing on the chilled water during the day without needing to necessarily use significant amounts of enegy.

Compared to full blown air conditioning it's significantly less energy intensive, but, as seen needs quite a significant amount of water to work (since most of the water ends up in the atmosphere).

Sure the whole island is farmland, we wont be running out of farmland any time soon. We also have 7 million cattle on the island producing beef and dairy, they use an awful lot of water too, I'd love to know how much water is used for this kind of agriculture compared with data centres.

Yes, it's all regulated.

Roads, lighting, footpaths, etc. will either be paid for direectly by the companies, or the local authority will provide them and then fund it via development contributions which will be laid out as part of the planning application being granted for the datacentre:

https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2000/act/30/section/48/enacted/en/html

Electricity - ESB Networks lay out clearly what the connection charges will be and the CRU sets out what the grid usage charges that contribute towards upkeep of the grid:

https://www.esbnetworks.ie/docs/default-source/publications/esb-networks-dac-statement-of-charges.pdf

https://www.cru.ie/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/CRU20181-Schedule-of-DUoS-Charges-from-1-October-2021-30-September-2022.pdf

Whoever the datacentre operator buys their electricity from then decides the unit rate on metered usage - which is ultimately whatever it costs the provider to either generate the electricity themselves or to buy it off someone who does generate electricity plus their margin for profit.

Water - Irish Water similarly have a schedule of connection and usage charges but for quantities as large as a datacentre might consume it's quoted for based on actual cost as opposed to there being a defined, finite list of charges levied. Water is billed based on usage and this is also regulated by the CRU.

Our water network was badly struggling before the datacentres arrived but significant investment has seen leakage get much better.

Our electricity network however was not, so much that ESB were told to divest of 1.3GW of power generation capacity over a decade ago, mostly in order to try and increase competition but also because they had a monopoly on the amount of electricity they were ultimately able to generate. A few operators (Energia, Bord Gais) subsequently opened up gas plants of their own but ultimately I don't believe (without checking to confirm) that 1.3GW of generation ultimately replaced what they removed. In the near future, the ESB are supposed to retire Tarbert (620MW) next year and Moneypoint (915MW) by 2025, another 1.5GW of power to be removed. Wind, at best, could produce a record 4.5GW of the typical 7GW record peak demand, but on some calm days like last week it can generate as little as 100MW (0.1GW).

In your car water circulates through pipes in the engine block and is then feed into the radiator which has cold air rushing over it to get rid of the hear. In a computer, they sickick a heat sink on tip of the processor, and water flow through pipes in it to a heat exchanger. Don't know why data centcentes need so much as they could have a closed system, or holding ponds.

There isn't an overall shortage of water in this country but it's not all in the places where it's needed. So, if data centres are going to be using the equivalent water of 20,000 people they need to be contributing to projects like the Shannon pipeline, not just the local connection works, or else they should be located in places where there is less stress on local supplies.

As regards electricity, they should be generating wind and solar on-site, and none of this business of buying up the output of windfarms away somewhere else. If they can't come up with a sustainable model locally, then what is the point of them?

You would need clean water or else you'll block up the cooling system. However, considering petrol station carwashes ahve been using filtered captured rainwater for about a decade now I don't see why it couldn't be a contributor to it

Bog all use in a hot summer, though.