Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance)
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73. To ask the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment if he has any concerns about the impact on the State’s climate targets from the recently announced plans by a major company to build another hyper-scale data centre in Dublin; if he has any plans to introduce a moratorium on such centres, given that this is additional to 16 confirmed cases of new data centres approved for connection to the national grid; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [9971/23]

Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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I am advised that during the period 2010-2021 EirGrid, the body responsible for developing and managing the national electricity grid, entered into 16 connection agreements for the purposes of data centre connections. However, no new data centres have been offered a connection to the grid since the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) published on 23 November 2021 the “CRU Direction to the System Operators related to Data Centre grid connection processing” (CRU/21/124). This decision requires data centre connections to have on-site generation (and/or battery storage) that is sufficient to meet their own demand.

In July 2022, the Government published a new statement on the role of data centres in Ireland’s enterprise strategy. The statement addresses sustainable data centre development to align with Ireland’s renewable energy targets, security of supply, sectoral green house gas emissions, and climate priorities. The goal of this policy is to ensure the positive benefits for sustainability are maximised and that digital technologies are used in a sustainable manner to ensure the energy and circular economy challenges from digitalisation are aligned with our climate objectives. My Department is working regularly across relevant agencies and government departments to support the effective implementation of this policy.

The recently published Climate Action Plan 2023 sets out a plan to implement the carbon budgets and sectoral emissions ceilings along with a roadmap for taking decisive action to halve our emissions by 2030 and reach net zero no later than 2050, as was committed to in the Programme for Government. The plan sets out measures and actions to ensure electricity demand is managed in line with our climate objectives.

Flexible and decarbonised demand from large energy users, such as data centres, is critical to protecting security of supply and ensuring consistency with the binding carbon budgets. As such the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) will publish an Electricity Demand side strategy and implementation plan this year. Additionally, the CRU will also carry out a review into the current gas and electricity connection policies for new Large Energy Users.