The cost of data centre growth in Ireland

Modelling the impact of data centres on electricity bills for Irish households

What do data centres have to do with your electricity bill? About €1.4 billion worth, according to our new report which reveals how data centres have been driving up the wholesale price of electricity in Ireland through rising and constant demand on our grid.

The research, ‘The cost of data centres: Modelling the impact of data centres on electricity bills for Irish households’, written by Dr. Seán Fearon, and commissioned by Friends of the Earth and Beyond Fossil Fuels, lays bare the real cost borne by ordinary people in Ireland due to the Government's data centre policy. 

Read the report

This is the first report to empirically assess and model the cost borne by Irish households because of rapid data centre growth between 2015-2023, whilst also estimating future costs in a range of probable scenarios. All of these scenarios are plausible and based on Ireland’s national energy grid EirGrid’s projections of how much electricity data centres, who already have contracts, could use. It models and quantifies the interaction effect between Ireland’s data centre demand profile and a dependence on fossil gas-fired power on wholesale electricity prices.