Eco-energy parks are beneficial... to big business

We should prioritise alternative energy for housing, transport, and industry, not assume we can harness private tech for public good

Amazon Web Services director of energy EMEA Lindsay McQuade and Bord na Móna chief executive Tom Donnellan as Bord na Móna and Amazon Web Services announce a strategic collaboration that will see AWS become the first business to join Bord na Móna’s first Eco Energy Park in the Midlands. Picture: Leon Farrell / Photocall Ireland

Last week, Bord na Móna (BnM) launched its new vision for what it calls ‘eco-energy parks’. 

The slick promotional video which accompanied the launch zooms in on Ireland from outer space, promising to harness the power of the sun to deliver a clean energy transition on 3,000 hectares of BnM land across counties Meath, Westmeath, and Offaly.

The intention is to co-locate alternative energy and battery storage with ‘large energy users’ such as data centres on what is primarily former cutaway bog, emplacing Ireland’s energy future on the ecological ruin of its energy past. 

The announcement on Wednesday also revealed a new ‘anchor tenant’: Amazon Web Services (AWS), the largest cloud service provider in the world with a huge data centre presence in Ireland. 

Minister Eamon Ryan welcomed the development as ‘an example for how energy providers and large energy users can work together to greatly reduce carbon emissions.’ 

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However, far from signaling a bright, green future, this project captures much of what is wrong with the current top-down vision of an energy transition tailored to the interests of foreign direct investment (FDI) over people and the environment.

What’s the problem?

It is easy to see why the model of an eco-energy park appears as a simple ‘solution’ to the problem of energy transition at a time of compounding electricity use by data centres. 

This is a sector that in 2022 used 18% of Ireland’s electricity daily, a number recently predicted by the International Energy Agency to nearly double to 32% by 2026.

The eco-energy park model has not emerged from thin air. 

As the tech industry has come under more scrutiny here for its energy use, it has worked hard (with the Irish State) to position itself not only as ‘sustainable’ but central to Ireland’s decarbonisation efforts.

Over the past few years this has taken several forms:

• 1. Corporate Power Purchase Agreements (CPPAs) enabling cloud providers AWS, Meta, and Microsoft to purchase wind energy directly from wind farms; 
• 2. The promotion of data centres as providers of flexible and interactive services to the grid; 
• 3. ‘Circular’ solutions such as AWS delivering waste heat to the Tallaght District Heating Scheme; 
• 4. Proposals to allow for ‘private wires’ which bypass the grid entirely and directly connect energy generation and use. 

The eco-energy park announced earlier this week combines all of these, suggesting direct lines between renewable energy generation and industrial use in the form of AWS’ operations.

So, what’s the problem?

The tech industry is keen to push the idea that society requires more cloud-enabled services including AI, streaming, and other data-intensive applications to solve the world’s problems including climate change. 

Of course, we live in a world where digital platforms and cloud computing have become integral to our lives and even governments.

However, this reality is undergirded by decades of unsustainable digital growth led by digital companies who have demonstrated minimal reason to trust their ‘responsible’ corporate models. 

We shouldn’t buy the tech industry’s conflation of society’s need with their own for-profit business models.

Projects like the eco-energy park not only harness public land, energy and infrastructure for enormously profitable multinationals, they greenwash the tech industry and deflect attention away from the fundamentally unsustainable trajectory of digital growth over the next decade.

Ireland is already struggling to meet its binding climate targets, with the electricity sector projected to overshoot its sectoral emissions target this decade by 12m tonnes of carbon dioxide. 

Adding high levels of new demand in the form of hyperscale data centres makes this challenge even harder.

We should be prioritising existing and future alternative energy generation for housing, transport and other industrial sectors, rather than assume we can harness the private tech industry for public good. 

As industry spokespeople make abundantly clear to politicians, they can move their operations when and if conditions become less favorable. 

Relying on these fickle commercial interests is anathema to the kind of long-term planning and investment we need to confront the climate crisis.

What is the alternative?

We are frequently asked: what’s the ‘alternative’ to such techno-solutionism?

In this case, we need look no further than where eco-energy parks are being proposed: the Midlands, where the ‘just transition’ has already played out in profoundly uneven ways, with the public imperative falling secondary to the dominant strategy of FDI-led development.

Not far from the proposed eco-energy park in Offaly is Derrinlough briquette factory. Until April of last year it was the last remaining briquette factory in Ireland. 

Shortly after dismissing the 62 workers, BnM abruptly put the building up for sale without even consulting the union. 

A campaign, led by some of the former workers and local community representatives, proposed transforming it into a centre for green social and cooperative enterprises engaged in retrofitting and other essential energy transition work — particularly important in an area experiencing some of the highest levels of energy poverty and reliance on solid fuel heating.

Claims that the eco-energy park will create jobs and local development for people like former Derrinlough workers and their families do not stack up: wind turbines, battery arrays, and data centres do not require many workers after they are built, and even the construction phase of such facilities relies on outsourced firms for specialised labour and expertise.

What would create jobs is direct investment and support for bottom-up, worker and community-led projects like those proposed in Derrinlough. 

Construction work in progress on a data centre, however, data centres do not require many workers after they are built, and even the construction phase of such facilities relies on outsourced firms for specialised labour and expertise. File picture: Denis Minihane

As international best practice has shown, inclusive and place-based approaches to the transition deliver the best outcomes. 

This includes consideration of place-based industrial infrastructures and heritage and how they can be repurposed towards social and environmental goals.

What is stopping the flourishing of many similar bottom-up initiatives and visions of a genuinely just transition? 

Semi-states like BnM are forced to operate as commercial entities securing the greatest financial return possible on their investments, rather than functioning as public bodies serving the needs and interests of Irish society, particularly the workers and communities in the Midlands.

As we have found consistently through our work with communities in the Midlands (and around the country), there is no shortage of ideas for imagining a genuinely democratic transition from below. 

What is missing is any meaningful engagement with these places beyond their value as potential sites for FDI-led investment and development.

• Dr Patrick Bresnihan is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Maynooth University.
• Dr Patrick Brodie is lecturer (Ad Astra Fellow) in the School of Information and Communication Studies, UCD.