Power to the profit-makers: Letting big tech source energy directly raises questions of climate justice and democracy
Private Wires is presented as facilitating the private sector to build grid infrastructure the State cannot provide. Picture: PA
In August, the Government published a consultation document on ‘Private Wires’.
Given the time of year and the boring title, it is no surprise that it received little attention beyond a few interested groups.
However, as identified in the document, the introduction of Private Wires represents a fundamental shift in national energy policy.
This is not just a technical matter — it relates to climate justice and the growing privatisation of our energy system by big tech.
In 1927, the ESB was established as the world’s first national energy utility. While energy generation and retail have been open to private competition for some time, the grid infrastructure, including substations, pylons, and cables, remains under the control of the ESB. Private Wires would allow a company to bypass the public grid by building its own private network for the generation and supply of electricity.
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The Government is keenly aware of some of the risks entailed in opening the door to privately-owned power networks. These include potential increases in household bills and insecure energy supply. But there are wider concerns at stake, especially in the context of climate action and decarbonisation.
Private Wires is the latest in a series of moves that have shifted the ownership, control, and use of energy from the public to the private sector. This process stretches back at least to the 1990s, with the liberalisation of the sector coming into force across the then-European Community. The rationale was that competition in a regulated market would deliver policy goals better than direct state intervention.
This rationale holds strong today: Private Wires is presented as a way of facilitating the private sector to build grid infrastructure and generation that the State is unable or unwilling to provide. What has changed is the driving force behind further privatisation: “Big tech,” a shorthand for the major US tech multinationals including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft.
The data-driven business models of these companies are not possible without the vast computing power provided by data centres. There are 82 operational data centres in Ireland, 77% of which are the big tech hyperscalers, and they demand 18% of Ireland’s grid supply on a daily basis (as compared to the European-wide 2.7%).
Due to the potential of blackouts, in 2021, Eirgrid imposed a curb on data centre grid connections in Dublin. Nonetheless, the Government signalled in 2022 that digitalisation and decarbonisation are twinned processes, essential to one another, thus reaffirming the centrality of data centres to Ireland’s green tech economy.
Industry advocates have argued that data centres are essential rather than parasitic to a decarbonised energy system. One strategy taken by lobby groups is to pose data centres as energy refineries, able to process intermittent renewable electricity into the profitable resource of data.
Ireland is poised to produce exceptional amounts of wind and other renewable electricity moving forward, and as cloud advocacy groups have promoted, Ireland can either export these growing renewable energy resources or they can “refine” them domestically through data centres and export them as more profitable “computer services” such as social media, cloud, and AI.
They do this with support from an Irish State facing pressures to decarbonise an underfunded, already-privatised, and poorly managed energy system.
Between corporate power purchase agreements (CPPAs), district heating schemes, and battery storage solutions, data centre companies have been proactive in positing technical solutions to problems of grid strain and decarbonisation.
These projects are both PR and material changes, for example, while AWS is providing heat to the Tallaght District Heating Scheme, this should be seen as a stopgap supplement to the development of more sustainable district heating powered directly by renewable electricity.
Microsoft’s data centre battery project, an experiment in grid flexibility piloted in Ireland, was so successful that the company will be applying it as a “blueprint” elsewhere in its global fleet. This allows it to promote an essential function of its data centres — backup battery storage — as a public service to renewable electricity grids.
In each of these scenarios, tech companies become mediators and solutions-providers between renewable energy and its delivery to the grid. But why are we adding the extra step of data centres? We need district heating schemes, flexible grids, and more renewable energy but these developments do not require the mediation of big tech companies.
The “energy parks” model promoted by semi-states such as Bord na Móna (BnM) offers a vision of what a future Private Wires scenario might look like.
Energy park plans propose “private networks" wherein renewable energy infrastructures are built on-site and in tandem with data centres, closing the energy/data supply chain within huge swathes of post-industrial land. In the case of BnM, these would be built on former cutaway bog under the public remit of a commercial semi-state, bypassing the messy particularities of the public grid.
At first glance, energy parks and Private Wires appear sensible responses to current energy challenges: Get these companies off the grid and eliminate these problems. However, allowing private, multinational companies to source energy directly raises a number of fundamental questions relating to climate justice and democratic decision-making during decarbonisation.
Advocates of data centres are quick to point out that all our online activities are sustained by these infrastructures — emails, streaming, cloud storage, AI technologies. However, the rapid growth in data-intensive activity is not driven by social need or benefit. Especially with the growth of machine-learning and AI and the current “grab” by big tech for these innovations, monopolistic companies are seeking to secure the means of data-driven production.
When tied into these global market dynamics, driven by competition and innovation, energy infrastructures that are designed around the data-driven services of DCs are vulnerable — just look at the recent wave of tech layoffs. Decarbonised systems need to be made accountable to more than short-term, commercial decision-making. They need to be based on democratic consideration and long-term planning.
Ultimately, State interventions such as Private Wires are about facilitating, not limiting, the expansion of data centres. Consider a scenario where an entire section of the grid is blacked out, while a big tech data centre remains operational, adding to “GDP” via exported data services but providing minimal benefit to ordinary Irish residents, whose role as beneficiaries in the energy transition is sacrificed to the newly data-driven imperatives of “green growth".
This is what big tech-driven decarbonisation looks like in the long-term without major public intervention. This is a clear question of climate justice: Who climate action is for, who benefits from it, and who carries the burden.
Private Wires appears as a potentially innovative solution to contemporary problems, but it can also be seen as regressive. Before the ESB, Ireland’s energy system was developed in a piecemeal fashion, was dominated by private and commercial actors, and provided uneven access and reliability.
In the transition to an electrified society, ESB was developed through (however imperfect) principles of national development. Rather than further erode the public values that underpinned the construction of our public grid, we should foreground them within any vision for an equitable renewable energy system.
September 15 is a Global Day of Action for Climate Justice. Many participants will be seeking to hold powerful interests to account in the transitions that are already emerging. The profound influence big tech companies are having over Irish public energy policy should be enough to cause alarm, especially in the expectation that they will be responsible for delivering public benefits beyond their often ruthlessly profit-driven business models.
In Ireland, the consultation on Private Wires takes a positive step towards ensuring that these processes do not occur without adequate oversight and accountability. But given the climate emergency, we need a a more transformative approach, one that overtly aligns energy transitions and decarbonisation not with private digitalisation, but with climate justice.
This would mean halting the expansion of data centres while also expanding democratic, public control over a decarbonised energy system.
