Blog 8_ Data centres
There are just over 120 Data centres in Ireland currently connected to the Electricity Grid and they use around 21% of all electricity generated. By comparison, residential customers use 28%. The other 51% is made up of non-residential and heavy power users (excluding data centres). The 28% figure is not out of line with other European countries like Germany, Spain, Italy and France where residential use is between 25 - 30% also. There is currently a Data centre connection moratorium in place for the Dublin region because the electricity grid there requires improvement works before resuming connections.
Many of the newer Data centres are used to provide web services and these can actually save the country electricity, as we would otherwise be using far more. To see how, consider an SME making widgets. One day the Sales Manager comes to the CEO and says he's been talking to the existing customers and some prospective customers and if the company could supply a different type of widget then sales would increase significantly. A business plan is produced which confirms a large improvement in Sales but extensive revisions to machine software will be required and it will take 6-9 months effort by the IT team to produce and test the new software before applying it to the production machines.
The CEO now has a choice. One option is to purchase/lease the PCs, servers, disks, processing power, switches, routers and a wide range of development and testing software that will be required, then connect it all together, power it up and install the software. This will result in a large increase in the use of electricity by the SME.
The other and lower cost option is to rent facilities from, for example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) - Google, IBM etc offer similar services. In the AWS Data Centres, all of the Hardware and Software is virtualised and may be used flexibly over the Internet by a large number of customers at the same time. There will be times when the IT team requires increased processing power or at other times increased disk space and all of this can be accommodated in the AWS rental contract. The power usage of the AWS Data centre is shared by hundreds of SMEs simultaneously, with all using far less electricity than would otherwise be the case. This is good business for Amazon also. In the 2nd quarter of 2024, AWS accounted for more than 60% of Amazon's overall operating profit!