An tOrd Gnó - Order of Business
Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-28
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Sarah O'Reilly (AON), Agricultural Panel

Irish households are being asked once again to carry the burden of rising electricity costs while some of the wealthiest corporations in the world continue to expand their energy demand across this country. A new report warns that households could pay up to an additional €644 on electricity bills over the next decade because of the growth of data centres. Collectively, that could amount to well over €1 billion taken from ordinary families due to higher energy costs. Data centres now consume 22% of Ireland's electricity - more than all urban homes combined - but it is the average person who ends up paying higher electricity prices while many of these large companies benefit from lower commercial rates. For example, Amazon has 14 data centres in Ireland and the company brings in billions of euro in profit every year. Their increasing demand for energy is driving higher electricity costs and the Government is expecting the average homeowner or renter to simply pay the bill.
Over 300,000 households are currently in arrears with their energy bills. Ordinary working people have far less ability to absorb higher costs than multimillion euro corporations. It is totally unjust to ask families who are already struggling with rent, groceries and childcare to subsidise the energy demands of big tech. The Government is talking about the need to transition to renewables but any cheaper renewable energy that is produced will be immediately gobbled up by data centres. If these corporations are placing huge additional pressure on our electricity system, they should also contribute directly to upgrading and expanding the national grid infrastructure required to support that demand. Taxpayers are effectively paying more so that the large tech companies can continue growing their profits with limited responsibility for the environment around them.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-05-28/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:01+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-28