Data centres back in the spotlight-using 18% of total power consumption of the country

I would guess that you wouldn't be happy if your entire family's photos were lost in the next Icelandic volcano eruption.

Many people who store their pictures in data centers that have not suffered any catastrophic outages find that their photos have in fact been lost.

Corrupted images on "the cloud" happens surprisingly often, because its cheaper to not have the proper redundancies or integrity checks in place.

Even google had similar issues with 10year old photos recently - though they still had originals intact thankfully in this case.

You die from food poisoning; that no fridge idea is looking even cheaper, as your future spend on energy, food, everything, drops to zero.

The cheapest way to provide large quantities of zero carbon electricity to power data centres, EVs and so on, is nuclear energy - by a wide margin.

In the energy infrastructure thread there was a big greenie high-five over a report that Ireland is on course to have 1 GW of solar energy capacity by the end of the year.

I wondered what that was actually likely to cost in terms of real output vs the utter BS that is 'capacity' and what alternatives would cost comparatively.

In terms of the capital cost vs the actual amount of electricity produced; solar costs €9.27 billion per GW, UK offshore wind costs €6.17 billion per GW, and Polish nuclear is projected to cost €3.19 billion.

So if you really value the hosting of data centres in Ireland, perhaps the cheapest cost of doing so should be considered. If the nation can't stomach the idea of nuclear and is irredeemiably wedded to the concept of expensive energy provision, then perhaps this country shouldn't be allowing them to proliferate.

Like all the stupidity in this country, you can bet your tits there's a significant amount of corruption behind this.

You have gotten confused here. The correct metric for this comparison is LCOE. Serious comparisons don’t bear out your conclusions.

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/levelised-cost-of-electricity-in-the-european-union-2040

Can't remember if I posted this already, but comparing the recent EI bill to the same company a few years ago, our household has reduced out electricity usage by ~66%. The last 2 months bill was for ~€240 and covered 480 units of usage (smart meter on old plan). Checked the bill for the same period from 2019: ~€260 for 1380 units. The 2020 bill for same period: ~€220 for 1180 units.

There isn't much more we can do to reduce our usage, yet even at ~66% less we're paying more than we used to. My only alternative is to install solar panels, which can cost anywhere from €6-18k. So if I go with 6k, one panel I assume, it won't pay for all my electricity needs so I'll still be paying EI and a loan on top of it. It's just not feasible at the moment. Seems like I'll have to change my entertainment to watching the grass grow and creating an outdoor hole for use instead of a fridge. I've to reduce my usage so companies can increase theirs... That's how it feels anyway. Data centres should have to invest heavily in renewable solutions here, and not just for their company, for everyone in the area.

I agree with the first part of your post, but not necessarily the final part. If Ireland's data centres were in the UK or France, the internet will continue to function normally.

But of course if every country tries to block new data centres this would eventually impact internet usage.

There's a serious question about how many data centres a small country with a small population should be hosting. Especially as our electricity supply is coming under more strain with the shift to renewable power. Especially if they are using 20% of the electricity.