A fifth of Ireland's electricity goes to data centres
On 23 July 2024 Ireland's Central Statistics Office reported that data centres consumed 21 per cent of all metered electricity in the country in 2023 - 6,334 GWh, against 1,238 and 5 per cent in 2015. Urban households took 18 per cent and rural households 10. Server halls had overtaken housing for the first time.
Why it matters
This is the first official state account in which computation turns out to be a larger line of the national balance than all the urban homes together. Until now the data centre share of an electricity system was estimated from outside; here it is counted by the same body, on the same method, that counts the rest of the country.
By quarter: 290 GWh in the first quarter of 2015, 1,661 in the fourth quarter of 2023. That is the 473 per cent rise, and it is stated for quarters, not for years. Against 2022 the rise is 20 per cent. Total metered consumption for the country grew 24 per cent between 2015 and 2023, so the data centre share grew about four times faster than the system itself. Large energy users as a whole took 9,102 GWh, or 30 per cent of metered consumption; the network classes most large data centres in that category. The office explains how it finds data centres at all: by the names and aliases of known sites, by high consumption in particular business parks, and by the customer names on meters with high annual consumption. What the record does not claim. This release says nothing about a moratorium on new connections. The restriction in the Dublin region predates it, so the report did not cause it.