Ireland: Data Centers Now Consuming More Electricity Than Rural Homes (irishtimes.com) 46
According to the Irish Times, citing new figures from the Central Statistics Office, data centers used up a greater share of electricity consumption than rural homes in the State last year. From the report: The overall share of metered electricity consumed by data centers has almost tripled in just six years, from 5 percent in 2015 to 14 percent last year. By comparison, urban homes accounted for 21 per cent of metered electricity consumed in 2021 compared with 12 percent consumed by rural dwellings. The figure for electricity consumption by data centers last year represents an increase of 32 percent in that year.
Data centers consumed 265 per cent more electricity in the three-month period between October and December 2021 compared with the three months between January and March 2015. Total metered electricity consumption increased by 16 per cent over the six years with data centers accounting for the 70 per cent of the increased consumption over that period. The surge in electricity use by data centers has come under scrutiny due to concerns about the State's energy supply and the targeted reduction in carbon emissions to tackle climate change. "There should be more discussion and more serious consideration of a moratorium [to block the opening of more data centers in order to reduce emissions]," said Dr Patrick Bresnihan, a geography lecturer at Maynooth University.
Allowing electricity consumption by data centers to continue to increase would make it harder for the Government to push policies where it is asking individuals to reduce consumption at a time "when consumption by data centers is so high and clearly just growing," said Dr Bresnihan.
Data centers consumed 265 per cent more electricity in the three-month period between October and December 2021 compared with the three months between January and March 2015. Total metered electricity consumption increased by 16 per cent over the six years with data centers accounting for the 70 per cent of the increased consumption over that period. The surge in electricity use by data centers has come under scrutiny due to concerns about the State's energy supply and the targeted reduction in carbon emissions to tackle climate change. "There should be more discussion and more serious consideration of a moratorium [to block the opening of more data centers in order to reduce emissions]," said Dr Patrick Bresnihan, a geography lecturer at Maynooth University.
Allowing electricity consumption by data centers to continue to increase would make it harder for the Government to push policies where it is asking individuals to reduce consumption at a time "when consumption by data centers is so high and clearly just growing," said Dr Bresnihan.
So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
The overall share of metered electricity consumed by data centers has almost tripled in just six years, from 5 percent in 2015 to 14 percent last year. By comparison, urban homes accounted for 21 per cent of metered electricity consumed in 2021 compared with 12 percent consumed by rural dwellings.
This summary is nothing but a cacophony of calculations and comparing random historical power consumption numbers with current consumption numbers...
Data centers, which provide jobs, consume slightly more electricity than "rural dwellings" - so what?
They are both fringe consumption categories, and all residential dwellings (urban and rural) add up to 1/3rd of all electricity, data centers consume 14% of the remaining 67% of non-dwelling (residential) consumption - so what?
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Re: So what? (Score:2)
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All the jobs, if not automated away, are elsewhere.
Possibly, but does this really ultimately matter? The existence of coal mines for example provided jobs in power plants, in the sense that without those mines, the power plant jobs would not exist. So you'd rather have those mines, even if lots of the jobs created by this were to be actually performed elsewhere.
Re: So what? (Score:2)
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I saw the article in IT and didn't bother to read it... but there are also articles about rural homes burning Peat (Turf) for heat, which isn't exactly environmentally friendly, and how city folk should just shut up about things they don't understand. I think the broader context might be relevant here.
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Irish citizens who find their electricity bills rising will be interested in this. The rules are different for domestic consumers and industrial consumers, and may need to change even further if there are problems.
It's also an opportunity. Demand for electricity means there is money to invest in generation. Ireland could exploit some good wind resources and develop an export industry. Many of these datacentre builders have net zero policies.
Are they good customers? (Score:3)
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Most corporations only care about whether the customers pay the bills on time, especially these days when short-term gains are all that matters. But sustainability is what matters most to nations, let alone to species.
Re: Are they good customers? (Score:2)
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Re: Are they good customers? (Score:2)
Just don't count it. (Score:2)
Git Gud (Score:3)
Those rural homes should step up their consumption game if they don't want to be embarrased.
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Re: Git Gud (Score:2)
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As a rural dweller in Ireland , I've started a grassroots campaign to start leaving fridge doors just slightly open
As a long-time vacuum-tube (valves for English English) aficionado, I'd recommend everyone in Ireland dump their solid-state hi-fi's in favor of glow-in-the-dark thermionics. It'll heat your homes, and sound great, and insanely drive up your current draw!
They also do look very alluring, with the room lights dimmed -- just a little forest of orange glows. Like a little city, almost.
I knew it! (Score:2)
I've long predicted porn, spam, and cat videos will somehow doom the planet.
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That's funny, but this highlights something we've all known for decades, but just didn't seem to care about. Modern software development is phenomenally wasteful.
I'm going to say something obviously true, but guaranteed to still be controversial: We can easily write software that uses fewer resources, performs better, and that is easier to read, but we need to abandon a lot of modern techniques. We can't continue to rely on continual hardware improvements to cover up for poorly written software.
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I was going to say the same thing. There is a lot of talk about generation efficiency here. There is a lot of talk about consumptive efficiencies on the electric side, there is very little real talk about consumptive efficiency on the compute side.
That every has a lot of effort into getting the most electricity out of the least coal, gas, surface area of solar panels, maximizing MW per wind turbine. We have a lot of effort into getting more compute or whatever other kind of productive work you want out of
Re: I knew it! (Score:2)
By design of corruption (Score:2)
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This brings lots of data centres and rich foreigners into Ireland, which indirectly helps the wealthy Irish and their conservative politicians but harms middle-income and lower-income people in Ireland and worldwide by enabling the biggest corporations to avoid taxation in dozens of other countries.
That's a wonderful myth.
If you actually paid attention to history, you would know that Ireland at the end of the Cold War was so incredibly poverty stricken that it was an embarrassment to the rest of the Europe when they were trying to entice all the newly free states to become part of an unified Europe (what is now the EU - I'll just use EU hereafter to keep things simple). It was an EU member but economically a poverty stricken wasteland - not exactly a great argument for the benefits of joining the EU
Re: By design of corruption (Score:2)
Rounding down 12.5% to zero is fairly unconventional. If anything dropping the decimal would conventionally bring it to 13%
Domestic power wasted on thirsty websites (Score:2)
As an aside remark on the power consumed by digital services, I note that far and away the biggest consumer of RAM and CPU on my laptop is my web browser. Despite having 8G of RAM, running my browser (Vivaldi) for a few days can slurp so much RAM that the machine starts swapping. And from time to time, CPU usage rockets, to the extent that I have to restart the browser to clear the problem. Exactly the same thing happens with Firefox.
I don't know the main cause of this. I suspect the proliferation of increa
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Blocking isn't a sustainable option (Score:2)
Great way to increase baseline load and costs (Score:2)
Let it out (Score:2)
Conservation is largely a fraud anyway. With steady but slow growth, you always need more over time. Get on it.
Best to let capitalism deal with it, with appropriate pollution laws, and stay out of the way.
Isn't that normal? (Score:1)
good (Score:1)
Human flourishing is proportional to energy expenditure. This means that Ireland is doing economic work. The energy just needs to come from a carbon neutral source. Build nuclear power plants and subsidize them with crypto mining during off hours.
Well they ought to (Score:2)
I mean, most of the needs of the populace are met using oil-based lamps to light up pubs, and growing potatoes uses remarkably little electricity.
This is Ireland (a tax haven) only (Score:2)
And if the percentage is high in other countries what is all that massive computer power being used for? Converting GIF's to JPEG's? I don't think so.