Data Centres
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-22
============================================================

Peter Burke (FG), Longford-Westmeath

That is not an admission; it is a statement of fact, and I am on record as saying that. It is in the programme for Government. There is a comprehensive piece on the economic value of data centres. That is what the research and the report were about.
On increased energy prices, various Deputies quoted reports which state that data centres are responsible for increased energy prices. We saw the report from Friends of the Earth. Notwithstanding that, from 2015 to 2023, we had a war in Ukraine and a huge energy shock, but the report in question blames data centres. We have to ask ourselves whether that is credible. This is the key thing on which people are being misled. Let us look at the contribution to the grid that data centres bring in the context of capital infrastructure and at grid capacity, the temporary emergency generation scheme and the amount that data centres have to pay. If a family is building a new house, there is a charge to be paid to put in an electricity connection. The charges for data centres are multiples of that amount. So they should be, because their infrastructural and capital costs are huge.
Obviously, data centres are buying energy on the wholesale market, which is like comparing apples and oranges. An amount is certainly asked for from them, and that money can drive forward our offshore renewables. This is a question that a lot of people advocating for our offshore renewables are not answering. How are we going to finance them? Are we going to say, for the five projects I mentioned, that we are not going to use that demand here? What about the 9 GW of onshore energy we are looking to bring in and the 8 GW of solar energy? Where are we going to have that energy demand? Are we going to rely on exporting energy to other countries that are increasing their renewables and their own energy independence or are we going to look at the potential of booking that value for Irish citizens?
There will be challenges along the road, and we have to be very careful that we do not get into a situation where there is a trade-off with housing or industry. The Government's new policy manages that quite well because we are driving renewables. We know it is set out in the report that there is a challenge with emissions, about 4%, from data centres right now, but the opportunity costs in bringing fully renewable energy onto the grid are very significant and no one wants to mention that.

---

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/dail/2026-09-22/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:49+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-22