Gluaiseacht Submission on Amazon’s Data Centre expansion in Mulhuddart
No to Amazon’s data centre expansion
No to gas expansion
No to increasing coal use
No to the Climate Crisis
The application states
“The Proposed Development in conjunction with the Permitted Developments and future indicative development, has an estimated peak operational demand of 219.7MW per year in total which translates to 1,925GWh annually. This equates to approximately 607,523 tonnes of CO2eq per year”.
For context, the CSO reported that the total metered electricity consumption for the country was 28,506 GWh in 2021. Therefore the electricity demand of this data centre complex would represent 6.75% of the current electricity demand of the country. The amount of electricity used would be more than the annual consumption of 500,000 houses or ¼ of the housing stock in the country.
Given that this is only one of 4 of Amazon’s data centre complexes in Ireland, the others being in Clonshaugh, Tallaght and Drogheda, it does indicate the relevance of Eirgrid’s Bill Thompson statement from May 2021:
“Ireland’s electricity system was surely not planned to be, nor designed to be, a system which seeks to serve the needs of the global citizen for increased data supported by an ever proportionately smaller non-data centre commercial, industrial and domestic load. Whilst not questions first and foremost for EirGrid it surely must as part of this, give rise to consideration and potentially wider national debate as to that which is in the public interest in this regard. ”
Bill Thompson, Eirgrid Group Head of Regulation in a warning letter to the CRU.
https://www.cru.ie/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/CRU21060-CRU-consultation-...
The EPA has estimated Irelands GHG emissions to be 61.53 million tonnes carbon dioxide equivalent (Mt CO2eq). Therefore on the estimate given by the applicant for this Amazon complex represents a 1% increase in Ireland’s annual emissions.
The emissions from the proposed development suggested by the developer itself area 202,139 tonnes of CO2eq per year.
However, we do not accept the emissions calculations that have been put forward by the applicant are an accurate or suitable quantification of the emissions that will be caused by this....