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Power

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.
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Ireland: Data Centers Now Consuming More Electricity Than Rural Homes

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  • So what? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kenh ( 9056 ) on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @09:43PM (#62501502) Homepage Journal

    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?

    • I think the situation is looking at growth sectors for demand then panic as growth (which is a sign of positive economic activity) is counter to the plan of some which is to use less power and therefore less emissions.
      • My takeaway was 'how dare the government ask me to make sacrifices when these data centers are proceeding unchecked' its like asking all the farm citizens to give up most food options and just eat stale bread while the pigs dine on wine and cheese.
    • 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.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      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.

  • by John.Banister ( 1291556 ) * on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @09:55PM (#62501510) Homepage
    If they pay on time, and they're willing to commit to doing so for a long time to come, then this sounds like a good opportunity to go for more rather than less, and have the commitment from these reliable customers be the basis for improving the low emissions power generating infrastructure. Three out of five of the "You may like to read" articles below this one mentioned nuclear power.
    • Or, you could put giant gas bags under the sea and pump 'em full with excess wind generation on stormy days. Then, with the friction of the air coming back out of the line to make power when the windmills are becalmed, you could have the only data centers that are powered on hot air.
    • 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.

      • Remember when 25yr was considered short-term gains? Now 25yrs is so long term they arent even willing to consider anything with less than a 5yr ROI.
      • I don't think sustainable energy is scarce. The funds to build the requisite infrastructure may be scarce, but this planet is a huge rock of building materials with truly enormous amounts of energy being blasted at it by the fusion reaction so large that we orbit it. In many ways, I think the hard part of building a lifestyle comfortable enough for the birth rate to go (stay) down without harming the ecosystem in which we live is just giving a damn enough to try and do it that way.
    • I do wonder how many watts could be saved if more effort was put in efficiÃnt code...
  • The solution is to just not count those emissions toward your total. It's coming from overseas and they will just put the datacenter somewhere else if you block it.
  • by Gabest ( 852807 ) on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @11:20PM (#62501596)

    Those rural homes should step up their consumption game if they don't want to be embarrased.

    • by Gavino ( 560149 )
      There's so many Twitter trolls waiting to duel with, and so many woke Netflix shows to watch, that they need to get on it pronto, t instead of doing all that useless stuff like ploughing soil, tending to crops, raising farm animals etc (more sarcasm).
    • As a rural dweller in Ireland , I've started a grassroots campaign to start leaving fridge doors just slightly open. Should get us back on top in no time. If anyone has any other helpful hints, we're all ears. P.S. Don't tell the data-centers
      • A couple crypto miners in your living room during the summer oughta do it. Extra heat you gotta deal with by running more AC as an added bonus.
        • by Muros ( 1167213 )
          Good luck finding a home in Ireland with AC. Some will still have the heating on in summer.
      • 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've long predicted porn, spam, and cat videos will somehow doom the planet.

    • by narcc ( 412956 )

      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.

      • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        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

    • Dont forget Meta lol.
  • That there are so many datacentres there is not by accident. Ireland is a tax haven, they charge basically zero corporation tax so everyone puts their headquarters there and funnels all their worldwide profit through Ireland to avoid paying tax on it. 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 av
    • Ah man, the Irish Tourist Board are not going to be happy with this somewhat negative (and possibly accurate) portrayal of our little island.
    • by Muros ( 1167213 )
      Bollocks. You don't need to have your servers in your headquarters. Server farms are in Ireland because it's an English speaking country in Europe near most of the transatlantic fiber lines, with a climate that makes air conditioning cheaper than most other places. If all the transatlantic traffic went through Greenland, all the server farms would be there for even cheaper cooling.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      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

    • Rounding down 12.5% to zero is fairly unconventional. If anything dropping the decimal would conventionally bring it to 13%

  • 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

    • I don't think it's just the ads. Modern websites rely heavily on Javascript so I guess that even without the ads they'd be much heavier than the sites of just 10 years ago.
  • Restricting economic growth isn't sustainable - it's unpopular, attracts corporate attack campaigns & right-wing populists, & the next elected officials will undo it all & you're back to square one but with a weaker economy. The govt needs to invest in energy efficiency measures that make companies more money, not less. Although corporations are loathed to invest in stuff with little or no short-term ROI, setting energy efficiency standards for new builds & providing grants to retrofit old o
  • Regular consumers now get to pay more flat across the board; as baseline consumption increases there remains little to no cheap surplus power. Now that could be considered a major benefit but for the fact these same entities also get paid for turning equipment off or idling it down. Win-Win especially if the companies involved are subsidiaries.
  • 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.

  • If my home was using more power than a datacenter I would be seriously worried. Those places are basically where the power concentrates to make the internet exist. It seems pretty logical that they use more power than a house.
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • What is the percentage in other countries? Ireland is a tax haven and that might be why they have so many data centers. Maybe they should not be subverting the world economy and are now realizing there are costs to their country for doing so. Or maybe their plan is to change their EULA and suddenly start charging massive taxes.

    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.

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