Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity • Hacker News Board

Re: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

#191

Post by thin_carapace » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 12:33 AM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #180

thin_carapace wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the grandparent commentor provided examples to illustrate 1 idea. you took one of those examples and showed how it could be used to illustrate another idea. thats fair enough. in your second comment you continued drilling this point without expounding upon it and without referring to the original topic. hence it seems you aren't interested in the overall conversation, rather whatever point you are trying to make. im…

Okay, fair enough. But once we stop doing things entirely because we are jealous of how some people use it, everything gets a bit dimmer. I'm all for pricing externalities in. There are some obvious ways to do that with plastic surgeons on scholarships. There are ways to do that with natural resources and power generation and distribution. There's also perhaps space for making deals with the government where load she…

not sure if you have enabled dead comments or not, somebodys comment was killed for calling you pedantic. anyway nose jobs and skin grafts are both done by a plastic surgeon; one of these procedures saves lives and the other doesn't. the argument is that the taxpayer should prioritize life saving over vanity projects. accusations of jealousy make it seem as though you have missed the point entirely, whether intentionally (which would make the muted person correct) or not

Re: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

#192

Post by vishalontheline » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 12:35 AM UTC

erentz wrote: post #181

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #135

Just to be contrarian: what we're talking about is "electricity use from economic activity". This should be good for Ireland but they'll need to build energy capacity to keep up. It's misplaced to be angry about datacenters themselves. There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools. Construction creates jobs, manufacturing the machines in the buildings is a huge global industry; the value people gain…

> There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools. But for who and where is it realized? Ireland’s massive data centers aren’t there to serve Ireland’s tiny population. The value is exported overseas and profits realized overseas. So what really matters for Ireland (and any country/region hosting these data centers) is whether the benefits in terms of capital spending + the few ongoing jobs created out…

Employees of construction companies, electricity companies and the data center, among others, all get paid, no?

Re: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

#193

Post by jamesfinlayson » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 12:35 AM UTC

dboreham wrote: post #31

stuaxo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irelands big pull to these companies is to not tax them as much as other countries.

That said, once built and lit up, it's hard to move a data center to another country.

Yep, seen a data-centre move happen at work (from a distance - I wasn't effected). For a business with cross-data centre redundancy and no allowable down-time for core business, it was at least a year-long project I think. All for a data-centre in the same city.

Re: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

#194

Post by hahahaa » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 12:39 AM UTC

pbgcp2026 wrote: post #141

hackerSkoolRoot wrote: post #27

Are we allowed post masto links? I'm an Irish techie. I shot a video about this. Sorry about the camera shake: https://mastodon.ie/@handi/116900076149521593

The last point is ... strange. Landfills / Datacenters analogy is far fetched and you do want *local* data if you want The Internet. You know, local regions / availability zones? Maximum availability? Cut undersea cables? Even for distributed Mastodon messaging ... LOL

Is 22% of energy generation of a country needed to serve services needed for that country? I mean it starts sounding like blockchain at that point.

Re: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

#195

Post by vel0city » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 12:42 AM UTC

vishalontheline wrote: post #192

erentz wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools. But for who and where is it realized? Ireland’s massive data centers aren’t there to serve Ireland’s tiny population. The value is exported overseas and profits realized overseas. So what really matters for Ireland (and any country/region hosting these data centers) is whether the benefits in terms of capital spending + the few ongoing jobs created out…

Employees of construction companies, electricity companies and the data center, among others, all get paid, no?

The construction companies don't continue to get paid much after the construction is complete.

Re: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

#196

Post by hinkley » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 12:43 AM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #155

hinkley wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being poor is expensive.

I mean, if you own a house (you cant put solar on the roof of something you don't own), you probably do have access to loans. Houses make great collerateral. Not neccesarily saying it makes economic sense to get a loan to install solar, just that homeowners usually aren't the poor class that saying usually applies to.

How many people do you know who own a house? Not a mortgage, own.

The housing market is such that a lot of people are overextended, and the mortgage market encourages people to change their definition of 'enough' house which makes it worse again.

The fact that I don't have solar on my roof is substantially my own fault. I moved in a year after a subsidy ended and it contributed to my procrastination. But then my power grid is comparatively cheap and comparatively renewable, which also contributes.

But I know a lot of people who know a lot of people who can't even stay on top of keeping their expected house repairs up. And that's also an investment in energy and your time and having construction people in your personal space for 2x as long as they estimated it would take.

Re: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

#197

Post by halyconWays » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 12:44 AM UTC

Electricity exists to be used, and we have essentially infinite free energy from nuclear power. Why are we wringing our hands pretending like we're going to run out of electrons? The days of hauling and burning ancient organic material to generate power should be over, and all these guilt-based arguments fallaciously require you to accept that as a premise.

Re: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

#198

Post by jmyeet » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 12:48 AM UTC

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #135

Just to be contrarian: what we're talking about is "electricity use from economic activity". This should be good for Ireland but they'll need to build energy capacity to keep up. It's misplaced to be angry about datacenters themselves. There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools. Construction creates jobs, manufacturing the machines in the buildings is a huge global industry; the value people gain…

Yeah this is just completely wrong.

Data centers pay sub-market rates for electricity (as well as getting tax relief, generally). Generally, they use so much electricity that more infrastructure needs to be built. Who pays for that? Not the data center. The utility's capex is spread across all customers (sometimes minus the data center).

Then the utility needs to generate moer power or buy it from elsewhere. That's typically at a higher rate than it's currently getting, which raises the average cost of electricity for everyone. But again, the data center is getting a discounted rate so you have a water bed effect raising everyone's prices there too.

And for what? Maybe a few dozens jobs. The "value" being created is for multinational corporations who likely won't pay anything in taxes for it.

Data centers should be taxed for the land value they allegedly create. We have precedents for this sort of thing, most notably imputed rent. So if you spend $300 million on a building that lasts 30 years, that's worth $10M/year+. Then there's all the compute hardware. Assume $700M amortized over 7 years. Well, the imputed rent is at least $110M/year in base costs, so likely $150M+/year.

All this adds up to it should have to pay tens of millions (and maybe as much as $100M/year) in taxes.

Re: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

#199

Post by hunterpayne » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 12:50 AM UTC

defrost wrote: post #179

hunterpayne wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post doesn't have a reply link for some reasons but here is my response. What they need is expertise in energy generation. They need to understand concepts like a duck curve, power storage and its material requirements, relative EROEI of various power generation sources and a basic understanding of when newer forms of generation are likely to be ready. For instance, they should understand that renewables need to…

So, you want a different article then. This article reports that Irish data centres use a particular percentage of the countries power. > What they need is expertise in energy generation. Okay, so an actual Electrical Engineer with grid scale experience. > They need to understand concepts like a duck curve, power storage and its material requirements, relative EROEI of various power generation sources and a basic und…

"Many people with a STEM background understand these things .. they are not generally called "scientists" in Commonwealth English."

Sure, but none of them work at the institution referenced by the article. That isn't what they do.

Re: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

#200

Post by socialcommenter » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 12:51 AM UTC

HtmlProgrammer wrote: post #60

My electricity costs 34 cent per Kw/h and I can’t afford solar panels or a renovation to air to water heating while the government insists we shouldn’t use oil / coal anymore nor logs or turf to heat our homes edit: I live in Ireland

It's crazy that people have to eat the long payback time to switch to renewable, while these wildly profitable (maybe?) data centers can just drink excessively from the grid or switch on natural gas turbines, and skip the lead times/upfront costs.

If they're so productive, make them eat the cost and lead time so we can all have a cheap, functional electricity grid. It would be so easy to mandate no new data centres unless they can procure their own renewable sources of electricity.