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.

Eh. No.

I'm saying that if its possible to suitable filter rainwater for carwashes it should be possible to do it for cooling water. But that there won't be any rainwater during a hot summer shortage anyway.

Explained here

irish context.

they can use as much as 500 tons of water a day.

O

The same strategy also states:

"Data centres can provide benefits to the electricity system due to their typically consistent, as opposed to ‘peaky’ demand profile which can provide system support at night. In addition, data centres are a potential provider of system services and demand response which is beneficial to Ireland’s energy system."

[...]

"For example, it is the case that large energy users such as data centres contribute to network charges and the PSO levy, and that increasing levels of renewables place downward pressure on wholesale prices thereby potentially mitigating the impact of PSO cost increases."

[...]

"Furthermore, data centres desire for ‘green’ electricity supply could stimulate supply and technology innovation in the renewable energy sector that attracts investment in Ireland and increases the pace of transition to low carbon technologies."

As to why our costs are so high:

• we shut over a sixth of our peak consumption in generation capacity and did nothing to replace it
• We left ourselves solely reliant on gas as the primary generator fuel source
• we refused to build infrastructure such as LNG to allow diversifying source of supply
• we pay renewable generators the gas equivalent cost per kWh, hence why we had zero insulation against the volatile gas prices as of late
• We know we will lose another 1.5GW of generation capacity by 2025 yet have done sweet feck all to prepare alternatives.

And now we want to move transport and heating exclusively to electricity and our grid has no capability to cope. But it is far easier to blame the datacentre operators for using up so much power than actually do anything to solve the issues facing us in the near future...

The main service provided by data centres is to the world, not specifically to the Irish economy, like motorways do. So, their benefit to us in the long run, is employment, and that is quite limited, as compared with other operations by multi-nationals. The water consumption issue was news to me. From what I can see, that kind of evaporative cooling was originally designed for hot climates where closed-circuit air conditioning is much less efficient. It could be still the case that it's cheaper here too, but why then aren't all cooling systems in this country, that type, as opposed to purely electrically powered closed-loop systems?

Yes, but same point as above. They provide an essential service to the economy as a whole

Yes, I accept that point. System services are useful. I'm guessing they can act as DSUs in the grid which is a benefit, but it's only a secondary benefit as compared with the primary concern of long term electricity consumption and the effect that has on our CO2 output. I'm not arguing against data centres per-se. But, I think we need to look very hard at where they are located in future.

Our climate is primarily why it's chosen - it's never extremely hot or extremely cold for extended periods of time, we don't suffer from extremely dry or extremely humid outside air, we're not on a fault line, we don't suffer major storms, tornados, floods, lightning, etc. and it makes it perfect for evaporative cooling as opposed to air conditioning:

Evaporative cooling works on the basis that if you draw warm air over water, the water will evaporate and this consumes a significant amount of the heat energy present within the air to do so. The end result is that you end up with cooler air that now has a higher humidity level than before.

You'll often see units in large shops during the summer that are blowing air that feels much colder compared to the air within the space around it but that aren't vented or piped anywhere so has no way of actually removing heat from the area it's "cooling" - that's an evaporative cooler:

Typically it's a sponge like material which is kept dipped in water so it is constantly absorbing. Air is then drawn through the wet sponge - in the case of a datacentre, outside air. As the air is drawn through, it causes water within the sponge to evaporate and the evaporation process removes heat as it does so. The sponge then absords more water from the tank it sits in and and the process continues.

That cooler, but also more humid, air is then blown through the ventiliation system of the datacentre where it is warmed back up again from the equipment present. That air gets extracted back outside into the atmosphere again containing the heat absorbed from cooling the equipment along with the water that was used to cool the air it as it was originally drawn in.

The only electricity used in the whole process is what is used to power the blowers to move the air around.

This is compared to a full air conditioning system which requires powerful heat pumps to move refrigerant around in a closed loop process. As it happens, though, cooling air using air conditioning naturally dehumidifies it as well, so you still end up using water even with a closed loop air conditioning system, albeit nowhere near as much water as with evaporative cooling.

Evaporative cooling works well here because our air is not too hot nor is it too humid - somewhere like Texas, for example, the amount of water you need to evaporate to effectively cool the air will make the air so humid as to be unsuitable for use in a datacentre environment.

100% agree on location. There's no need for them to be all clustered around Dublin and a recent consultation by the CRU alluded to that too:

Datacentres should be located close to where the generation occurs. It's been mostly Dublin up to now as that's where most of global connectivity lands and because the bulk of our island's generating capacity is centered around Dublin. That's why Apple were trying to locate theirs in Athenry, so it would be much closer to the source of wind generation along the west coast.

Directly, they don't employ many - but indirectly, Microsoft, Google and Facebook all have significant numbers of staff here, on high wages (high tax revenue), there are Irish companies who are being called upon all over the world to bulid datacentres based on the experience they've built up here, it's driving necessary investment into our electrical grid and broadband infrastructure (only it's the cart trying to drive the horses).

Surprised nobody has posted about the datacentre outages in London recently:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-19/google-oracle-data-centers-knocked-offline-by-london-heat