Data centre power surge equivalent to adding 160,000 homes to grid

EirGrid has forecast data centres could account for 30% of Ireland's electricity demand by 2030.

A 10% increase in electricity consumption by data centres last year was the equivalent of adding around 160,000 homes to Ireland’s power grid, a leading energy expert has said.

Paul Deane, a senior lecturer in clean energy futures at University College Cork, said the rise in data centre electricity use during 2025 would also generate greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to putting an extra 30,000 cars on the road.

New figures from the Central Statistics Office show data centres accounted for 23% of Ireland’s metered electricity consumption in 2025.

While electricity use by all other consumers increased by 2% over the year, demand from data centres rose by 10%.

Data centres consumed 7,663GWh of electricity in 2025, a 518% increase on 2015 levels.

“There'll be people out there who will look at these numbers and say this is a good thing,” said Mr Deane, adding the bulk of data centre activity was concentrated in the Greater Dublin area.

Government policy has supported the expansion of data centres as part of efforts to attract and retain multinational investment and strengthen Ireland's digital and AI infrastructure.

In a report commissioned by the Department of Enterprise, KPMG said continued development of the sector could help secure 94,000 jobs and avoid the loss of €1.6bn in annual employment-related tax revenues by 2030.

However, concerns have also been raised about the environmental impact of rapid growth in the sector, with the UN previously citing Ireland as a "cautionary tale" in relation to the energy demands of AI development.

EirGrid, the operator of the national grid, has forecast data centres could account for 30% of Ireland's electricity demand by 2030.

Mr Deane said plans to make AI the cornerstone of the economy could backfire when dealing with the limitations of a strained national grid.

EirGrid has also previously alluded to "a potentially challenging situation" in meeting Ireland’s energy demand between 2026 and 2028.

“Where these companies are building data centres now are countries where there is lots of spare capacity on the electricity system, so there's lots of wires to move power around, and there's lots of power plants to make that power,” Mr Deane said.

“In Ireland, they started doing that in 2015, so we had a 10-year headstart, so a lot of that extra headroom that we had on our capacity of wires to push power around and on our power plants to make power has pretty much been saturated now.” 

He said the increased demand on the grid comes against a backdrop of slow progress in developing renewable energy infrastructure, with plans for large-scale offshore wind farms facing delays.

“The challenge really for Ireland over the next number of years is to build more wires and build more power plants. It's very quick and easy to build data centres,” Mr Deane said.

“They tend to be modular buildings that go into industrial zones, but as we've seen in Ireland, building power plants is really hard. It can take four to five years, even longer.

“I think really the Government should be encouraging data centres that can bring their own power, but that power must be clean,” he said.