Energy demand in Ireland21 Jul 2018 23:15
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/net-results-data-centres-need-to-power-down-their-energy-requirements-1.3561745?mode=amp&__twitter_impression=true .............
Data centres are big business in Ireland. But should the State demand more in how they are built and how they draw down energy? Especially when one proposed Dublin data-centre development would eventually have the energy demands of a city the size of Galway?
Growth area
Data centres remain a big growth area here. A report last April, produced by Host in Ireland in association with Bitpower, noted that €1.1 billion invested in such centres this year will bring total data centre investment to €5.7 billion by year’s end.
It predicted that, by 2021, that sum would reach €9 billion.
A lot of that build cost – which runs to hundreds of millions of euro per centre – goes to creating the infrastructure to run the servers and cool them down. An average centre might use 10 to 20 megawatts (MW) of power, while Amazon’s proposed 223,000 sq ft facility will need 35MW.
But the company has bigger plans, proposing seven more for a data-centre complex of about 205MW on the Mulhuddart site. Such a huge conglomeration would suck up the energy equivalent of a small Irish city. If the full eight-centre project is realised by 2026, Amazon has acknowledged it would use about 4.4 per cent of the State’s entire energy capacity.