A Shortage of Drinking Water and Electricity in Ireland

Why would you be concerned about wasting digital storage? The energy and cooling demands in a datacenter are dominated by CPU utilisation not storage capacity.

Remove half the CPUs and you reduce the energy demand of a typical datacenter by 50%, remove half the storage and you might spare a couple of percentage points.

Data centres use 14% of electricity in Ireland. Source is from May 2022: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/data-centres-now-consuming-more-electricity-than-rural-homes-cso-1.4868221

From that same article:

14% now. Could be 30% by end of decade if we don't take action. There's effectively a moritorium on new data centre grid connection offers in the Dublin area. So action has been taken.

With more people living here the required direct resources and the pressure on them... water.. electricity.. healthcare.. increase..

Data centres ?... fine and dandy but if they are consuming resources that people need and are no longer available to them 100% of the time... questions need to be asked such as how were they given planning permission to build these centres ? ? ?

Something sinister or just incompetent people in planning?

Wouldn't Iceland be the place to put all these date centres with its unlimited thermal power and cold climate??

If datacentres are going to blow a hole in Ireland's emissions targets, why is there now a massive push to electric vehicles and electric heating in homes?

They want 1mn EVs by 2030 and average private mileage in Ireland is 17,000KM. That's 46KM every day of the year.

46KM a day x 1,000,000 vehicles = 46,000,000KM a day.

Typical EV consumes 20kWh/100KM.

460,000 x 20kWh = 9.2GWh a day, 276GWh a month, that the grid must now generate and supply.

A datacentre, using 14% of total load each month varies between 336GWh and 405GWh:

That's before widescale adoption of heat pumps is factored in over the coming decade.

However a datacentre will consume its total load fairly evenly throughout each day, week, month, EVs and heat pumps are far more "peaky" and lumpy power sources, requiring huge grid resources across the space of a few hours and then sitting idle for the majority of the time. This peaky lumpy load factor is what puts the grid at risk of shortages and rolling outages, not the flat load factor of datacentres.

And its the peaky lumpy load that needs less efficient, more polluting, peak load generation to maintain supply.

So again, why the move to EV and electric hearing if datacentres are already risking Ireland's emission targets and the electrical grid?

siphoning the Shannon will destroy its flora and fauna.

How? The quantity being talked about is about 3% of the overall flow rate of the river. And the water would be extracted from Parteen so the 90% of the length of the river that is upstream of that would not be affected in any way at all.

The requirement for storage drives the existence of data centres. If we weren't storing every mindless photo and video and every useless email, the requirement for data centres would be far lower. They put the 'data' in 'data centres.

You're suggesting this is part of a decades long conspiracy whereby the government encourages data centres, government encourages smart meters, then some day in the future, the government will be able to reveal their true evil intent by restricting electricity to residential areas.

And then the government... gains in what way exactly?

I've no comprehension of a worldview where this "plan" could seem in anyway plausible.

1) Am I the only person to think it a tad ironic that somebody is complaining about data centres by posting on an interactive electronic message board which is being hosted by.......a data centre?

2) Who says there are "70 data centres in Ireland"? There are probably many many more than that. There is no standard size for a "data centre". In fact, the industry is telling anyone who wants to listen that the future growth of digital services will be at "the edge." Which is to say, in much smaller data centres and in much larger numbers than the huge centralised highly virtualised installations that have sprung up lately. I

Edge data centres are basically your old on site computer rooms in a slightly different guise. The analogy with public transport is stark. Do we want a relatively small number of double-decker diesel-spewing buses (large data centres) taking everybody to work and play or should we all have our own private vehicle (edge centres) to take us wherever we want?

Ironically it may be advantageous in the broad scheme of things to have a greater number of fuel and heating efficient large data centres rather than a plethora of smaller ones. But if we restrict the number of larger facilities we will just see people installting many more smaller ones that fly under the regulatory radar and end up consuming as much if not more electricity in total than the larger ones.

We will have to generate more electricity no matter what we do. And more of it will have to be generated in smaller and more discrete locations. Rather than have a few central generating stations producing ALL our energy we will have to have smaller, even domestic, power sources such as solar panels on roofs, individual wind turbines etc etc all of which can be aggregated to reduce demand on the overall grid. It will need a change of emphasis for the ESB too, migrating to be a broker of numerous power sources rather than a distributor of a relatively small number.

3) I wouldn't worry too much about water. The use to which it is put by data centres is minimally polluting and it can be recycled fairly easily and cheaply. It is used in the air-conditioning and cooling functions of all data centres and does not have to be potable (drinking quality) for such purposes. We'll get it all back anyway.

Is there any such thing as a storage only data centre?

If you want to argue against the digital society in which we live, then you are free to do so. But it would be like trying to make the case for the divinity of Thor or Jupiter to a modern audience. That ship has sailed!

Data centres are not JUST about sharing kitty pictures on TikTok or engaging in monosyllabic exchanges of invective on Twitter. They are the building blocks of much of the services we depend upon today. Can we turn the clock back? Well, it's been tried. By the likes of Pol Pot. (He's not remembered fondly)

In times of extremis, people can endure shortages and lifestyle changes which appear at first sight to bring them backwards. In the last War (or Emergency, if you prefer) for example, private cars practically disappeared from Irish roads. We, or our parents/grandparents, went back to the pony and trap or even to Shanks' Pony. A backward step, maybe, but one necessitated by the dire shortage of petroleum fuel. (We were stock piling it all to give to German U-boats, remember? :) )

However, once the war ended, things rebounded pretty quickly. The new plant that had been established for the war effort, especially in the US, and the advances in technology and production techniques that had been facilitated by the war brought a huge boom in consumer goods and technological advancement. Certainly, things were better in the more affluent place like America but Ireland got pulled along by the general euphoria eventually. The 1950s were pretty bleak here; the 1960s were transformational.

Digital technology has huge potential, still, to change society and how we live and work. It won't all be for the better but it is likely that we will not want to go back to the old ways.

Have you even any idea how much a postage stamp costs nowadays? If you are under 30 do you even own a record (sorry, CD) collection? Do you know what a VHS cassette is/was?

Data centres are here for the foreseeable future. In many forms. Yes, we need to make them greener, more efficient and more sustainable. But wringing our hands and saying Can we get rid of them? does no good.