I find this debate a bit odd. Climate change is a global issue. So moving these emissions out of Ireland so Ireland can reach it's targets doesn't help if those emissions mearly happen elsewhere in the world. In reality, there is two options either these data centers are simply not built, which isn't going to happen. Or rich countries such as Ireland, take it on to themselves to see taken on datacenters as a burden they must carry, coupled with increased renewables. With Ireland's wind on the west coast potential, this is something we must Especially with a temperant climate<p>Moving the datacenters away from East coast Dublin to West coast. Galway in an ideal world would be also useful.
Data centres consuming electricity isn't the problem. The problem is running those data centres on fossil fuels.<p>There has been an increased push to run the data centres on green technologies like solar, wind, and nuclear, e.g. [1]. Due to the machines being co-located makes it easier to do this compared to every website being hosted on machines spread over the country, where it is more likely that they will be run by fossil fuels.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/rush-data-centers-creates-us-solar-hotspots-2024-02-22/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/rush-data-centers-cr...</a>
Ireland is upping its game to take advantage of it being a very ‘windy’ country. A 130 tonne flywheel, spinning inside a vacuum at 3000 rpm is set to offer some inertia to stabilise the grid, a common problem with wind power production. We’ll need this if we’re to meet power demands and achieve the Irish government’s lofty wind power ambitions.<p><a href="https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/stories/irelands-great-grid-stabilizer.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/stories/irelan...</a>
I miss the cultural era that was enthusiastic about economic growth. Most stories I see on HN, and other places, now react with reflexive condemnation of any kind of human industry. I worry about where this zeitgeist will lead us.
I'm old enough to remember the world without a constant presence of the internet and connectivity. I wonder how much energy these datacenters have actually saved thanks to technologies like google maps, email, online shopping, etc..
Governments ought to incentivize efficient datacenter workloads, the same way they're incentivizing heat pumps over resistive heat. If they can give people tax credits for having efficient homes, they can give maintainers of large-scale software something in exchange for optimizing that software. I bet some very large percentage of data center electricity usage is directly attributable to absolute bloat, like VMs that could be containers, build pipelines that chug away endlessly producing nearly identical build artifacts every time, dumb polling that could utilize a smarter message queue push, neural nets that could be if statements, etc. -- where is the "LEED Gold" of software?
There may ultimatley need to be taxes on wasteful energy use. Less so on infastructure but very high on frivolous energy waste for things like crypto and AI as absurdly wasteful toys without meaningful use.
If anyone has an interest in Irish mythology <i>and</i> data centers, I'd highly recommend a listen of the Blindboy podcast's hot take on it:<p><a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/rivers-lakes-and-data-centres-in-irish-mythology/id1300577518?i=1000581630409" rel="nofollow">https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/rivers-lakes-and-data-...</a>
This is no match for the AI apologetic.<p>- AI might have the solution to electricity over-consumption today<p>- If not today then in the near future<p>- If not in the near future then before the necessary timescale for climate change reversal<p>- You have no reason to doubt such long time horizons; just look at the last few years and insert imagination for upcoming years<p>EDIT: But this would be much worse if Ireland was running on something like coal.