Business & Industry uses over 75% of electricity in Ireland. Residential energy usage really is not that much, in any country in the world.
Same with CO2, almost all of it is created by industries.
Don’t worry - electricity also trickles down.
Although not an expert on that specific country, I can be sure that ’ almost all ’ is very misleading, even if it gets a lot upvotes because people find it convenient to blame some big bad other. Even if you have specific data for electricity, don’t forget a lot of CO2 is emitted by cars, and also by fuel to heat homes (including some peat in special case of ireland - and in that country a large fraction of GHG emissions is also methane from agriculture).
Well, in the US, here’s a decent breakdown by sector:
- 30% industry
- 31% residential & commercial
- 29% transportation
- 10% agriculture
I don’t know what the breakdown is between residential and commercial, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s pretty even.
- 38% agriculture
- 21% transportation
- 14% energy
- 11% industrial (combined mfg combustion and industrial)
- 10% residential
- 5% other
So yeah, unless you count agriculture as “industries,” they are one of the smaller factors in Ireland, especially compared to other parts of the world.
For whoever’s interested in long form vid essays about likely root cause
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2R8q8GDwZ0
Looks like they have at least one more about Ireland but ive yet to watch that one.
As a tech professional, fuck AI, fuck Neoliberalism, and we need unions:
Can we just cancel the whole “ai” thing? It was fun for a bit, now it’s just problems.
This isn’t AI, but datacenters in general. EU stuff tends to accumulate in Ireland.
Ireland’s boom in datacentres and tech companies has been fuelled by its policy of low corporate taxation.
There are some data centres in the UK that use the waste heat to heat the local swimming pool. Seems a good idea, we need compute and we need heat, why not do both at once?
Surely it’s not too much of a stretch to have datacentres contributing to local district heating systems either?
I have had this argument with my politically minded friends. These are not all that bad. Ireland has an ever increasing percentage of renewables, they provide a high standard of living for their employees and the demand exists regardless of where we put them.
Some moved to block these, and so they would exist somewhere else. The only difference would be that place might have less renewables and Ireland loses opportunity for high income positions.
I’m not saying what anything in your post is wrong. I would like to add, though, that there’s a housing crisis in Ireland, and I know half a dozen tech workers that can’t afford their own apartment. Just saying.
Absolutely there is, the housing crisis is a result of long term failures by government. While it may be exasperated by refugees and asylum seekers, the system should have allowed for this but it did not even allow for natural population growth.
There has been a 20 year under delivering of residential housing. The government has failed to stop large funds buying up large swathes of new developments to rent out or sit on.
There are very simple solutions that could be immediately implemented like banning Airbnb, banning, corporate residential ownership, increasing taxes on multiple homes and introducing a meaningful derelict/unused home tax.
The problem is the governments pensions funds are tied to the real estate market and the level of taxation on other forms of investment has left property as the main viable option.
Commercial zoning is different, not entirely unrelated but the datacentres are not competing with residential property developers.
Date centers need a rule that says they can only run off renewable energy.
Why does the rule need to be specific to data centers? Why not just try to encourage renewable energy in general?
I really wonder how much large scale energy production we’d need if every building was required to have solar. I know we’d need some energy storage tech such as batteries but I’m focusing more on the generation part.
Requiring solar is good for certain regions, but it might be better to make this more generic for any renewables especially because there are areas that don’t get a lot of sun.
For instance, California requires all newly constructed homes to have solar installed, but that wouldn’t work too well for places that are mostly cloudy throughout the year, or for places like Alaska.