"Green" policies are destroying this country

Not to mention all the tech which allows people to work from home and not pointlessly commute (like I’m doing right now) and hence emit carbon dioxide

But that seems to be the problem with the Luddite wing of the Green movement

Their hate for science and technology overrides their main stated goals

Maybe "powered" is the wrong word as we are also talking about the electricity requirements but, yes, without data centres vast swathes of our industry would not able to cope as well.

The same is true for every other country in the world and there's no reason it can't be more evenly distributed. Let's take the EU as one example where there are about 1200 data centres while Ireland has about 80

Effectively we have 1% of the population of the EU and 6.7% of the data centres and all the emissions that come with that which is a bit skewed.

Are we hosting 6.7% of all the tech multinationals?

Our emissions are skewed only because the Greens and green adjacents refuse to contemplate clean, cheap and reliable nuclear power and are fascinated by glossy marketing materials of companies that rely on China for “renewables” and the stupidity of Irish consumers who willingly pay the highest electricity costs in world to entertain these notions that still leaves us with some of the highest co2 emissions in Europe

Not that it matters, the stupidity of actively obstructing high tech good tax paying industries that quite possibly help reduce overall global emissions on environmental grounds is daft

Data centers are at the center modern economies, even before the rise of internet transactions, credit and debit cards do not function, transactions must be reconciled with bank accounts at the end of the day, that requires power to drive the systems network, memory & CPUs. Quite a few people work in finance and accounting.

Airlines and travel agents have been using networked computer systems for years. Payroll has been automated for many organisations, maybe some people here remember Cara payroll group. Telephone and communication networks are software driven, that requires data centers to link up the edge networks.

You may have noticed that many businesses that may have been at the center of various towns business districts are long gone, and been replaced by chain stores all linked to different networks for payment processing and inventory control.
Companies such as Argos & Maplin have bitten the dust unable to compete with internet shopping and courier delivery, If you have ordered online you will typically track the parcel and maybe even get an ETA.

Modern economies depend on data centers to complete most business transactions, even if you are dealing in cash, somewhere on the back-end there is software running on a hosted data center where the small business has to file their accounts or lodge the money in the bank.

Having the major centralized data centers are probably more efficient than having every company individually host their own servers. Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Equinix datacenters are hosting more than local Irish businesses, we should be looking for the cost benefit analysis numbers behind the data-centers that host the "cloud". I don't have any numbers for this.

Well considering Energiewende is still ongoing and Germany have a similar market to us, whereby the highest priced unit is what all the suppliers get paid, it is not much of a surprise.

France runs mainly on relatively clean nuclear while Germany has decommissioned most (all?) of its reactors before doing the same to their oil, gas and coal plants. Once the fossil fuel plants are gone there should be a major shift in that figure

You forgot the annual emissions reduction of 3.5%, which is the only thing that would realistically have happened by now

A switch to gas from nuclear would in theory increase GHG emissions or do you "believe" differently. As for the economic output the stats suggest you are incorrect 🧐🧐🧐

https://kpmg.com/de/en/home/insights/overview/economic-key-facts-germany.html#:~:text=With%20a%20Gross%20Domestic%20Product,making%20it%20Europe's%20largest%20economy.

Be as distrustful of biomass here as across the Irish Sea.

Drax hit with £25m penalty after 'lying' about wood pellets (businessplus.ie)

When is sustainable not sustainable.

25 million fine is but a drop in the ocean so long as the subsidies keep coming.

The only biomass that ever made sense was sugar cane alcohol in Brazil. Drax burning wood is nothing short of an outright fraud so with this fine I have no idea what was left to lie about.

“reliable source of continuous electricity”

hahahahahha

Hahahahahha

Hahahahha

🤣

That’s 6.5GW of installed wind right now, if you had a car that could only drive 5% of advertised range you wouldn’t call that “reliable”