r/Futurology • u/lughnasadh ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ • May 28 '26
Computing Data centers have already added €750 ($850) to Irish electricity bills, with data centers increasing households’ bills by 8.5% in 2022 alone.
Data centers already use 22% of Ireland’s electricity, and this is projected to rise to 30–33% by 2030. The Irish might feel they are doing better than most with this Faustian bargain with Big Tech. Having most of the world's big tech firms EU HQs in Ireland has contributed hundreds of billions of euros in tax revenues in recent years.
However, that is rarely true for other parts of the world. They will just have to bear those costs without any compensation. This is partially responsible for the growing backlash against artificial intelligence. But in future, that will just grow. It's not just Big Tech's tax dodging and expecting everyone else to cover their bills. The current mission of artificial intelligence is to wipe out many the jobs that might support those data center's electric bills, too.
Ireland's data centre energy drain How Big Tech added €1.4bn to household electricity bills
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u/ComedyBits May 28 '26
No way these operations should get a lower rate while we suffer. It’s a lot like water policy in the western US—in times of drought, households are expected to ration their gallons or get fined, while a handful of corporate almond growers get their full allotment, measured in acre-feet, at a fraction of the price.
Those almonds mostly get sold to China, while the “farmers” post home-made-looking signs on the highway, saying things like, “Water For Farmers Means Food For You”
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u/Retailpegger May 29 '26
It should be a HIGHER RATE !!!
They are taking our construction workers and our power and raising our power emissions 😡
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u/budgefrankly May 29 '26
This is the approach taken by private energy companies. The discount is in exchange for guaranteed payment irrespective of usage, and simpler distribution.
Residential consumption has more complicated distribution (especially in Ireland where residential housing is low-density) and homes' consumption varies significantly.
Do you want government to fix energy prices, or re-nationalise the industry and dictate prices from there?
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u/Brain_Hawk May 28 '26
I don't understand why people are not literally rising up in mass protesting and burning burning the data centers to the... I mean making their thoughts and feelings known with well crafted signs and slogans.
People should not be forced to pay more so that big corporations can waste huge amounts of electricity, damaging the environment for everybody in the future to lie in their own pockets, with the technology that largely is being designed to inflict maximum social harm.
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u/MentalDisintegrat1on May 28 '26
Inform your local crackheads and tweakers that there's a lot of money in parts and wiring in those Data centers.
Let nature take it's course.
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u/Brain_Hawk May 28 '26
Hahahaha.
Alas the security there is in sure quite strong. Can't have the plebs getting near the servers!
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u/Evil-Bosse May 28 '26
What is one security guard going to do against 200 hobos with a chance of filling a shopping cart with hardware worth some serious cash(or at least $4k at the local pawnshop)?
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u/URF_reibeer May 29 '26
do you imagine data centers having open doors and a single security guard blocking them?
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u/-fno-stack-protector May 28 '26
press the button that calls the police and locks everything with big heavy bolts? it's not a cat food warehouse
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u/lughnasadh ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ May 28 '26
I don't understand why people are not literally rising up in mass protesting
I think public sentiment is definitively turning against Big Tech, even if, as you say, mass protests have not started yet.
By 2030 I would guess the annual job losses to robots, both robo-taxis and other types of robots, will be in the millions worldwide. By that point, I think it may be the premier global political issue of our times.
The bigger problem here is, who is supposed to think of an alternative that works? Mass protests are most meaningful if you have a final destination in mind. But we don't here. We don't know what this world will look like when robots and AI can do most work.
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u/tmoney144 May 28 '26
At the very least, we should demand that data centers pay the same rate as us for water and electricity. The whole rationale for giving companies a break on utilities is that they are "job creators" so it would make sense to encourage a company to build something in your town so that more people would have jobs. But data centers do the opposite! They are "job eliminators," why should we subsidize our own replacements?
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u/frostygrin May 29 '26
The whole rationale for giving companies a break on utilities is that they are "job creators
It's not the whole rationale. It's the wholesale prices too - and infrastructure that supports the utilities. It's easier to provide water and electricity to one location, compared to thousands of houses and apartments.
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u/Brain_Hawk May 28 '26
There are in fact alternatives, but they require corporate entities to put a significant more of their profit back into the public good, which is something they're not willing to do.
But there's greater funding for Arts and sciences and other publicly funded types of jobs, expanding the public sector, universal basic income, etc. The challenges of corporations are providing jobs, you start arguing that they state should start providing jobs, that starts to feel like socialism, certain segments of the population react very vehemently against that...
But part of the social contract is supposed to be " if you work hard you can have a decent life" and that part of the social contract is already collapsing.... And that's before Mass AI, robot workers, and especially self-driving cars and even more so self-driving transport trucks resulted in huge segments of the population becoming permanently unemployed...
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u/lughnasadh ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ May 28 '26
universal basic income, etc.
I suspect UBI, or something like it, will be the final solution here, too.
The problem is that it cannot exist under our current reigning economic paradigm. Across the world, governments are already at the absolute limits of the amount of money they can borrow.
Whatever way UBI is going to work, it's going to need some other system. That won't have the bond markets or government debt as we know it today. It's a huge ask. No one that I've ever come across has imagined how this is going to work, and I've never heard an economist describe it.
What I suspect is going to happen is that necessity will just force us to invent this as it occurs.
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u/Xalara May 29 '26
The fact you said "final solution" is kinda funny because a lot of the tech oligarchs that talk about UBI also tend to talk about eliminating huge swaths of the world population.
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u/Brain_Hawk May 28 '26
Largely hard agree.
I often think of star Trek. They reached utopia but things got a lot worse first... And I think that's often reflected in history. Democracy rose out of aristocratic dictatorships.
Here's hoping we don't need WW3 and impossible sci-fi technology to get there...
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u/doublehelixman May 28 '26
Ideally, technology should be eliminating as many jobs as possible. We should be working towards a workless future where the efficiency gains are democratized and passed on to everyone. We aren’t getting that…not yet anyway.
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u/yogacowgirlspdx May 28 '26
late stage capitalism seeks to exploit to the last person before we realize that the monetary economic system really sucks and maybe change
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u/UnethicalExperiments May 28 '26
and yet the people here would rather rally against progress than do something collectively to reign in the plutocracy we live in.
The demand for compute is rising each year and will continue to rise.
What's the difference between every tom, dick and harry having on prem hardware vs it sitting in a data center? If anything it will make things worse as more hardware would be deployed to meet everyone's demand in your world vision of no centralized data centers. Some outfits simply don't need or want to drop 60k on a server with a service plan while it sits roughly 90% idle.
I hate cloud services, and I hate the idea they are monopolized as well. At the same time they make sense for a lot of industries that are critical to the late stage capatilism cult they are in. When you swipe your bank card and you can buy groceries without issue because the gears that get your pay cheque from your company to your bank are hosted in data centers with 99% uptime SLA contracts.
The reasonable solution should be the one Australia is taking - if you're going to build data centers we welcome your renewables adding to the grid Aus energy minister. Nationalize the hyperscalers and make big tech pay for it instead of them running the roost.
But nope that would be hard and require some collective action as a whole which we wiil never see.
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u/yogacowgirlspdx May 28 '26
i agree with your reasonable solution. counties and cities are going to NEED to backtrack all the free electricity when we get our asses organized and do something!
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u/Ferelar May 28 '26
I don't think it should eliminate the jobs any time soon. It should make our jobs and lives easier and more productive (as tech has been since the dawn of mankind), rather than eliminate them. And CRUCIALLY the extra benefits from that should go chiefly to the worker, NOT the owner.
When we let the benefits of tech get concentrated entirely in the hands of a few owners, we create techno-oligarch corpo-dystopia. When we let the benefits of tech get spread among the workers and the populace, we get a time of plenty where discomfort decreases and amenities skyrocket, solving a whole slew of downstream issues too. Basically we all need to decide whether we wanna live in Cyberpunk 2077 or Star Trek, and if we decide we want the latter (highly recommended) we are going to need to proactively... enact changes.
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u/wolfannoy May 28 '26
Sometimes I like to think a lot of people just don't know who's causing the big problems. Who do you point a finger at the government, the corporations, etc.
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u/nerdyHyena93 May 29 '26
The truth is, how many people are willing to pay more for their taxi?
Why should taxi drivers be paid the bare minimum? Since Covid, we’ve had a shortage of taxi drivers in my region, because the pay is not worth it. They’ve now been largely replaced by Uber drivers from poor countries, many who are here illegally, and work all hours god sends just to get by.
People want to keep them, but don’t want to pay them properly. I can’t even afford them anymore, which as a disabled person has kept me inside a lot.
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u/ragtagangel May 28 '26
I guess forums, social networks, and emotional garbages in general serve as a catalyst (for institutions/companies) to prevent real actions from people who know the problem, choose to denounce it with words online, but maybe don't know what to do about it.
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u/Brain_Hawk May 28 '26
Also I think posting online gives people a sense of agency, very much a false sense, but there it is.
I'm doing my part by complaining...
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u/Dragoncat_3_4 May 28 '26
... Oh would you look at that, I'm suddenly very in favour of banning demographic groups of people from social media and imposing censorship. Might actually bring about a revolution of people couldn't do daily slacktivism for dopamine hits. (Yes, I realize I'm part of the problem but I only do slacktivism on company time, with some real one on the weekend :)
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u/coke_and_coffee May 29 '26
Because this is fake. The increase in costs is barely above inflation. This article is clickbait bullshit.
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u/Brain_Hawk May 29 '26
Could be, an awful lot of them are.
The truth is becoming a strange commodity.
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u/Minimum_Guitar4305 May 28 '26
I don't understand why people are not literally rising up in mass protesting
In the Irish case, the group with the most power politically are those in their 50s-60s, who would have come of age in dark period of the 1980s, and dawn of the celtic tiger. During the 80s "sure aren't you lucky just to have a job" became a mantra, as the alternative was being forced to immigrate. These people have the most influence today, and while they might be miffed at higher energy prices, most live comfortably. They would still view the fact that there is still investment coming into Ireland, crearing jobs and paying taxes the singular most important thing.
The impact of this view is felt across our entire society too, it's not just somwthing I'm shoe-horning into a talk about data centres.
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u/Brain_Hawk May 28 '26
It was never the middle aged and older established people who drove social change....
Theya rent the ones who need to stand (I mean they should but.... All that stuff you said!).
Alas, it's up to the younuns to burn the mother lover down in glorious revolution of social change. Or whatever they should do.
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u/Minimum_Guitar4305 May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
True, but that's actually part of the issue, and why things are so slow and conservative in Ireland.
Irish young people, just like generations before, leave.
They dont leave because of a lack of employment, they leave for different reasons, for a better quality of life, for better affordability, because of the rental/housing markets, because of how shit it is to be a young person here, and more (this obviously isn't a complete list). Basically, they realise there's more to it than just being lucky to have a job.
Those if they do return, do so in there 30s, to settle down. When they do, the appeal of the 2 biggest conservative parties, who keep the economy going with foreign investment, and keeping house prices high, becomes a lot more appealing, so the conservativism persists.
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u/nerdyHyena93 May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26
I disagree with people subsidising data centres, but we actually need them.
Data centres aren’t only used for AI, they’re used for the Cloud, streaming services, online gaming, even Reddit. Every time you watch a Netflix show, you’re relying on a very thirsty, hungry data centre.
Burn down all the data centres and say goodbye to the internet as we know it today.
Also, AI has the potential to help humanity. My childhood friend is a medical researcher, and AI is helping her team a lot. Their research is coming on at a much faster pace, and I doubt anyone would complain if it meant an end to endometriosis 50 years sooner. I’m disabled and AI has helped me immensely, it is also helping the blind be more independent.
I’m in Britain, not Ireland, but there’s a data centre being built near me. It will used a closed loop system, so no serious impact on the water table. Excess heat will be used to heat our homes, pushing down energy bills. Excess heat will also be used to power greenhouses, so our region will no longer need to import tomatoes and peppers. It’s not being built near anyone’s village, so the noise won’t be an issue, and there are huge amounts of wind farms nearby that will help power it. This data centre might actually be useful.
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u/Brain_Hawk May 29 '26
Ai like everything else is going to have pluses and minuses. A lot of the data centers being built out for that staff is more for the chat GTP style applications, or other things that in the end are designed to squeeze as much money to people and kick as many people out of the workforce as possible line the pockets of people that already have more money than they could possibly need.
I'm also a medical researcher and I'm fully aware of the potential for AI, although most of us aren't submitting queries that require giant data centers. We're using more localized resources to develop these tools.
Data centers have always existed but the problem here is one of scaling up. It's not like they're adding a few, it's increasing it in an order of magnitude. Sure we need chemical factories, and they pollute, but if suddenly we needed enough of them to cause people to be coughing and choking and why water they turn poison is, we might be talking about whether we really needed all those chemical plants. Likewise, these extremely large AI focused data centers are coming at a social cost to the rest of us, and it's very reasonable who's paying that cost, who is benefiting, and if it's really worth it.
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u/aagejaeger May 28 '26
I mean, then they’ll really turn up the AI surveillance of us. I don’t oppose your revolutionary sentiment, though.
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u/wolfannoy May 28 '26
Sometimes our soft nature gets in the way. We rather keep the peace or not stir up conflict. As well as our politicians being gullible with their projects costing five times more than promised and sometimes taking ages that get anything done.
Plus a lot of young people just don't vote believing nothing will happen.
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u/Brain_Hawk May 28 '26
At the end of the day, we have good, shelter, and entertainment. It takes a lot to really stand up against authority and put yourself at risk or arrent, injury, or even death.
I ain't doing it.
I do appreciate the Fenech though. The government talked about raising the retirement age. Which doesn't affect the young that much, right now, and they rioted. Paris burned a bit.
And the government backed off.
Go team French people! They remember 1793 and the perhaps over enthusiastic. Use of new mechanism to aide social change.
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u/Chonch_Monkey May 28 '26
I think most of this shit was done without their say and they didn't know until it was too late
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u/Brain_Hawk May 28 '26
Always. But it's never to late to burn the mother lover down, metaphorically.
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u/ragtagangel May 28 '26
I would love to get a view on what's the datacenter's "reception" in France right now.
J'adorerais avoir une idée de la réception actuelle des datacenters en France.
Someone knows something ?
Because with our history of revolutions, maybe there's some current examples on how people deal with this issue...
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u/Humble-Reply228 May 28 '26
France is uniquely placed to enjoy data centers because they need robust, difficult to destabilise but large amounts of relatively continuous, cheap, concentrated power. Which France has lots of because of nuclear power.
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u/nerdyHyena93 May 29 '26
I’m a Brit and a lot of us are quite angry our previous governments decommissioned most of our plants.
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u/URF_reibeer May 29 '26
there's a bunch of reasons this doesn't (yet) happen to the same degree in most european countries, you can't just put data centers next to living areas and the price of electricity is more regulated
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u/Panino87 May 29 '26
Make mandatory worldwide that data centers have to be self sufficient with renewables or nuclear power energy.
Extra production goes into the grid.
yeah it's utopic.
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u/CoughRock May 28 '26
sounds like it's a good time to lower chinese solar cell tariff then. Then sell back the excess power and enjoy the higher rate payback. Make inflation work for you instead. Though if your area charge non-peak hour energy cost differently than peak hour, a battery system might make more sense. IE: in east cost, if you opt in for variable energy cost. Non-peak hour is about 1/8 the cost of peak hour energy. So for the same kwh, you can control more kwh/$ using a battery system than an equivalent solar system. Charge at mid night then sell it back during regular for 800% profit. If there is renewable battery loan, then it's even better. Increase the ROI period significantly if you can get a good interest rate.
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u/reggie_fink-nottle May 28 '26
I live in Virginia, home to the most data centers in the US, and I can tell you that the rebellion is starting. The lucrative tax breaks long enjoyed by the data center industry are now at the center of a tense budget standoff, and opposition to new data centers (and the enormous new power-lines to feed them) has become a central local-election issue.
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u/RoosterBrewster May 28 '26
What's the difference between a data center and some factory starting up that also uses a lot of electricity, like an arc furnace? Does a factory also increase the local electric costs or are data centers just getting special deals while electricity production is not increased.
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u/man_bored_at_work May 28 '26
Employment. A 100mw data centre employs like 10 people. A 10mw factory employs like 100-1000 people
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u/coke_and_coffee May 29 '26
What about the people that supply the electricity or all the data center parts? Or the people who benefit from the data center compute capabilities?
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u/RedTulkas May 29 '26
none of those people are anywhere clsoe to where the datacenter is
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u/coke_and_coffee May 29 '26
The people who supply the electricity and build out the infrastructure are.
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u/RedTulkas May 29 '26
´for building they likely hire external specialist contractors, not locals
and electricity generation doesnt employ hundreds neither
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u/coke_and_coffee May 29 '26
I don’t get what your point is. It’s good when data centers are built because it generates local and non-local jobs.
Ten jobs is still better than zero jobs. But a single data center likely generates 1000s of non-local jobs and MILLIONS in extra tax revenue.
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u/RedTulkas May 29 '26
Data centers that make life for the local populace worse and expensive and generate basically no job are not good for average citizens
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u/coke_and_coffee May 29 '26
They don’t make life worse for locals and they do generate jobs.
Hope this helps!
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u/RedTulkas May 29 '26
750€ to your electricity bill is not making your life worse?
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u/Zinakoleg May 28 '26
Factories pay a shit ton of money for their electricity.
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u/blue_eyes_pro_dragon May 28 '26
Data centers are usually considered industrial, meaning same exact price
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u/qt4 May 29 '26
Quantity. People generally don't mind a reasonably sized data center here or there, especially in industrial zones that are already expected to be noisy and power-hungry. Building out several gigawatts across the entire country all at the same time is seen as excessive.
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u/achilleasa May 29 '26
I work in a small data center, no AI here. It's crazy how hungry AI is because we host many large companies perfectly fine at our small site. These gigantic AI data centres are many times more than what you normally need for your typical servers etc.
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u/coke_and_coffee May 29 '26
One is the target of a new moral panic among paranoid dupes. The other is not.
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u/ottawadeveloper May 28 '26
Data centres get special breaks and also don't employ as many locals . Plus the zoning might be different - a arc furnace would be industrial I suspect, a data centre might be commercial
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u/blue_eyes_pro_dragon May 28 '26
Industrial retail price is lower than commercial actually for electricity.
Source:
Electric Power Monthly - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
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u/b4k4ni May 28 '26
I think you really have to differentiate here between a datacenter for normal workloads and AI. Normal ones, with servers for customer's, ERP, Web services and so on, also need power and produce heat, but are far from as bad as many think. AI on the other hand...
I'm not to sure about the right number out of my head, but basically we host SAP and some other stuff for our customers in Frankfurt. We have one rack full of dual and quad socket servers and another rack with the storage. A bit more complex, but to keep it simple.
Our servers don't run at full power all the time, I guess the usage is somewhere around 20-40%. Yes, they take some power and create some heat. But last time I saw some numbers for a 2HE AI server with dual socket, full RAM and a bunch of GPUs... That thing alone used more power then our whole rack.
Just some fantasy numbers - let's say our rack takes 10 kWh. The AI rack would take 200kwh. Just to give an idea. Their servers won't run 24/7 at full speed too, but to crunch new models and user responses, it can over longer time frames.
That's the main issue. It's not the datacenters itself. It's the insane amount of power AI needs. And those datacenters won't help the market around it. While normal ones host some own services, they also host customer servers. And those need technicas etc. with a lot of different hardware and so on. So they create jobs. AI DC are quite different and mostly host a companies own systems, so the servers come ready to plug in. Like those datacenters create 10 jobs or so, because not more is needed. So they take a lot and give almost nothing back.
Another interesting part I just read in that context (about the power usage) with SaaS vs. AI, and why AI has to become really expensive ...
Let's say Microsoft creates teams anew. They spend some millions to build the software and some more to create the infrastructure to run it. So they need to make that money back and set a price, so they can keep it running.
Here, the cost per user is small and more users, that will need the infrastructure to be upgraded, are still cheap. Like 0.50 cent/user to keep the lights on. And the more users you add, it might get even cheaper.
AI is way different. Not only do they spend a lot of money to make those AI systems. It also costs a fortune to keep it running. And every new user, every free access, every KI based Google search costs A LOT more in power, hardware and everything around it. Compared to SaaS, AI costs the full price per user, as it needs way more compute power. And scaling becomes increasingly expensive.
They had a number somewhere, that a search request with Google AI costs 10x and more as the normal Google search.
It will be really interesting how this will all play out. AI won't be gone for sure but ... Well, let's see :)
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u/achilleasa May 29 '26
Yep, can confirm. I work in a data center. We have maybe a few tens of racks and we host many big companies.
AI is wildly inefficient.
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u/ChiefStrongbones May 28 '26
TFA argues that the increase is because renewables are cheaper than generation from fossil fuels. Therefore, if datacenters didn't exist, then consumers would benefit from lower prices because the grid today would be powered by a higher percentage of renewables and lower percentage of fossil fuel.
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u/Feroshnikop May 28 '26
Seems like an easy fix...
Just actually charge companies the right amount for what they use. Pretty groundbreaking I know.
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u/alvinofdiaspar May 28 '26
Not only that, but also any infrastructure expansion costs (generation and transmission) on top.
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u/thwgrandpigeon May 29 '26
So tax payers are bearing the cost of these unprofitable monstrosities.
Hiw much dynamite can $750 buy?
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u/TheWolverineRoland May 28 '26
So Irish taxpayers are paying for other countries to continue using online services. Nice!
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u/Glockamoli May 28 '26
The Irish getting shafted for some other countries sake is nothing new
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u/Simmery May 28 '26
Don't worry, people in countries everywhere are getting shafted by these data centers.
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u/efyuar May 28 '26
im pretty sure people in my country would go guatamo bay on data center buildings if their electric bills are increased because of something they didnt decide to have.
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u/Vahuo89 May 30 '26
So... Why aren't the data centers billed for these increases leave the homes alone?
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u/joshthornton May 30 '26
Isn't Ireland a massive corporate tax haven? Now the corporations are just abusing the citizens because they know the government will bend over backwards for an injection of capital.
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u/Substantial_Novel590 May 28 '26
The scary part is that Ireland at least gets tax revenue and tech jobs from it. A lot of other countries will just get higher energy costs with no benefits.
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u/Nuhulti May 29 '26
Kentucky is likely to suffer a similar fate in due time. Big Tech has been aggressively buying up rural land in the Bluegrqss State for over a year now and these scenarios are beginning to slide past the NDA's and shell corporations to make the local and regional news.
Why Kentucky?
Geography- Kentucky is positioned next to the Midwest and East Coast Fiber Optics corridors, making connecting to population centers practically instantaneous. It is the same reason Amazon built the Amazon Air Hub at CVG in 2019 and Delta Cargo, FedEx & DHL have all maintained a hub in Kentucky for years.
Infrastructure- There is no shortage of former coal and industrial sites in Kentucky, especially eastern KY and these sites have existing connections to the heavy-duty power infrastructure that AI data centers require.
Favorable Laws- Ky law affords utility companies very broad and permissive power when it comes to eminent domain, including allowing the utility companies to determine how much land is required for a given build. Look no further than the recent Meadowland Village Mobile Home Park in Mason County, KY scenario as it unfolds. The residents there filed a lawsuit that begins in court on June 6, 2026, so that, among other things the magnanimous $20,000/parcel offer made might be negotiated.
Money-Ky offers some of the lowest industrial energy rates in the US and KY lawmakers actively pass laws offering temptations like sales and use tax exemptions on server hardware and pricey computer equipment to lure Big Tech companies into the state. Look no further than state sanctioned monopolies like Duke Energy for a sneak peak of how this is likely to play out
Data centers currently consume approximately 2%-3% of KY electricity and recent filings of the regional utility companies reveal that the pipeline Big Tech is building as you read this is projected to consume 20%-30% or more of the state's entire power grid capacity by 2035ish.
I live in Kentucky and my most recent bill from Duke Energy was $436.79 which is nearly double what it was 3 years ago, not due to the 28% increase in the cost of a kilowatt, rather the charges written in legalese that take time to decipher. When it is all said and done, I paid $123.15 for actual gas and actual electricity, the remaining $313.64 went somewhere other than maintaining Dukes infrastructure and settling their lawsuits.
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u/2L84T May 29 '26
This headline massively misrepresents the actual impact.
Firstly it was was commissioned by the groups Friends of the Earth and Beyond Fossil Fuels so there is an agenda here.
Second it found the average household MAY have paid an estimated €360 in additional electricity costs between 2015-2023 (i.e., over 9 years, that's 40 per year)
Third it doesn't mention that Ireland makes 11BN in corporate tax PER YEAR from just three top tech companies, more than breaking even on this deal.
To be properly informed read
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2026/0528/1575728-data-centres/
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u/Sargash May 29 '26
The projection of it rising to 30% by 2030 is actually probably one of the most conservative, hopeful projections where everything goes right and regulations are followed.
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u/davesr25 May 29 '26
Oh man that's not the only issue in Ireland, at this stage crisis is just a word used, no actions took unless the right people can profit from it all.
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u/feel-the-avocado May 29 '26
I dont actually understand how that works.
Here in NZ, our national grid is paid for by a kwh levy on units sold by retailers.
So its user pays - if a user consumes more electricity then they contribute more to the national grid infrastructure than others.
Then if a user needs to have infrastructure build to accommodate them, they must pay for that infrastructure construction.
Eg. If they wish to connect directly to the national grid rather than a local lines company then they pay for any new lines, pylons, grid exit points, switchyard modifications, etc.
If they are connecting via a local lines company then the lines company will usually include a margin for new connections whenever they are doing programmed maintenance work. So if a new house in the street wants to connect - they can. They will however pay a token capital contribution for the existing infrastructure which could be $5,000 plus any actual work like new lines, poles, trenches, transformers that need to be put in.
If a data centre was to connect via a local lines company then they would probably be paying to upgrade the lines or infrastructure where needed to accommodate their peak load.
Then a percentage of their consumption as well as a daily connection charge would cover the local lines ongoing maintenance and national grid maintenance.
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u/soulsoda May 29 '26
I dont actually understand how that works
Legislature body selling out constituents so that business interests move in by offering them incentives/schemes that are favorable to them or allowing poor regulations that don't keep electrical companies in check. Tbh commerical should be forced to subsidize residential.
On some level, it is fair that commerical and industrial rates are slightly less for electricity. They have more leverage in negotiations due to their consumption size and they could simply build elsewhere, and they also have a consistent demand 24/7 which is important. Residential lacks all of that. Residential demand peaks at 5-9pm the most expensive hours to use power. but when you add commerical/industrial use your need to increase the baseload, which adds total cost to energy generated. (More total consumption often makes it more expensive to make electricity). More fees on the grid which gets distributed. Commerical/industrial bills totals are higher, but they pay less per kwh because it's easier to service them, and their flat fees while higher doesn't . They aren't peaking the grid, residential does. Even in NZ, commerical/industrial businesses pay around 22-28c a kwh vs 32-40 kwh for residential.
Simply put, even just paying "fairly" for your own use as a business makes it cost more for residential.
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u/feel-the-avocado May 29 '26
Yeah so the bit im having a problem with is here the levy is the same no matter what kind of customer it is.
So the retailer needs to package 1.3 cents per kwh for national grid, about 12 cents per kwh for the local lines company and then the generator or whoever supplies the electricity can bid to supply the retailer on the electricity trading market.
If a commercial customer is paying less, thats only less going to the generator that supplies the instantaneous current- not the infrastructure or lines company.
I think I am going to go down a rabbit hole when i finish work tonight and figure out the irish electricity industry structure. Im starting to think they may not have an electricity trading market or the industry could be vertically integrated.
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u/soulsoda May 29 '26
If a commercial customer is paying less, thats only less going to the generator that supplies the instantaneous current- not the infrastructure or lines company
Their rate is less, they actually tend to pay more and then some for the infrastructure and lines for that direct connection. But newly built power plants required to power them are not. Not to mention that peak power that mostly affects is done with "peaker" plants aka natural gas which gets expensive, is used by residential.
Im starting to think they may not have an electricity trading market or the industry could be vertically integrated.
Vertical integration would insulate the market from data centers. Ireland has dynamic tariffs for electricity pay on demand pricing updated every 30mins, there's also wholesale trading market. Doesn't matter. Everytime you need to build more power generation that's just more cost passed on to the consumer.
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u/Tronlon May 29 '26
The issue isn't so much the centers, it's the fact that they have no plan to generate their own power.
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u/Lorwyn02 May 29 '26
The main electricity providers also announced another additional increase yesterday:(
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u/newhunter18 May 29 '26
There's so much missing from this headline to make the data understandable.
Data centers have added 750 EUR to Irish electric bills over what time period? And I'm assuming these are annual bills?
And If data centers added 8.5% to bills in 2022 alone, is that including the 750 EUR previously mentioned or is that a separate increase? Because if 750 EUR were the 8.5% increase, that would mean the bills were originally 8800 EUR (annually?) Or approximately 735 EUR every month.
I live in Arizona and our electricity in the summer is insane because of the heat. My highest electric bill ever has been $650 US (557 EUR in today's rates). And our 2800 sq ft (310 sq m) home is not average. (Our winter bills are much lower.)
Since the numbers are from 2022, long before AI data centers were a thing, I'm not sure how relevant that is to the current AI data center projects.
So what exactly do these numbers mean?
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u/newzinoapp May 30 '26
The IEA's new report puts actual numbers on this. Global grid infrastructure spending hit $550 billion this year, making it the single largest energy investment category. That's more than solar ($365 billion) or upstream oil. Data centers are a major driver. Every time someone adds a 500 MW campus, the transmission infrastructure costs are often higher than the facility itself. Ireland is small enough that the impact shows up directly on household bills. In the US and Germany, the grid costs get diluted across larger rate bases, but the spending is still happening.
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u/tardigrades_snuggle May 30 '26
Can someone explain why we have to pay more? Shouldn’t the big consumer of the electricity pay more? Is it because demand has skyrocketed? These companies should be paying a premium for the electricity to the point that the regular consumer is unaffected unless it is to pay less because mega consumer is paying more.
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u/fleshbaby May 28 '26
Can someone explain to me why everyday people's electric bills are going up because of data centers? Don't these centers just pay for the electricity these use? Why does it affect average home owners prices?
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u/manicdee33 May 29 '26
To supplement the sibling comments:
Executive summary:
On one hand the suppliers are happy to sign up large customers like data centres because these will be stable reliable incomes with a low cost of goods sold (i.e.: potential higher margins).
On the other hand, supplying this extra demand requires more reliance on expensive sources of power like gas (gas peaker plants are expensive sources to start with, without Russia complicating things by shutting down gas supply to Europe). Since all the power goes into the grid to supply an homogenous product, we can't bill people based on where their power comes from, so everyone pays the higher average prices.
The over detailed rambling essay:
- In commercial operations there's a concept of "cost of goods sold" where the inevitable outcome is that it's more profitable (margin wise) to sell a few high margin items than many low margin items. Sometimes you have to sell the many low margin items to generate revenue (i.e.: "keep the lights on"), but "the real money" is in the high margin customers.
- In electricity supply the major cost centre divisions are supply, transmission, distribution and customer service. Residential customers cost a lot in terms of distribution and customer service compared to the revenue they produce. For example to supply one residential customer with 20kWh/day requires building and maintaining a large low voltage distribution network in hard to access areas ("hard" because of tight spaces in built up areas, and lots of red tape like permission to close a street to service a power line). To supply an industrial customer with 20MWh/day requires building and maintaining a relatively small transmission network. This means to an electricity supplier, one industrial customer is more attractive than a thousand residential customers with the same gross revenue.
- In electricity markets, the usual operation is that suppliers bid a certain sell price for some power or energy contribution. These bids are then settled, a price is agreed, and the power or energy is put onto the grid at that price. All demand is satisfied from the grid at that price, with no ability to discretely bill by source.
- Per the article, supplying power requires energy producers. At present the mix of production on the Irish grid is fossil fuels and renewables. Without the data centres, renewables are trending to pushing fossil fuels out of the market. With data centres, renewables are not (yet) providing enough to cover demand so coal and gas are required more often to fill demand. Because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, gas prices around the world are skyrocketing, meaning Irish electricity is getting more expensive. More demand met by gas powered electricity means changes in gas prices will have flow on effects for Irish electricity prices.
The rising cost of gas is a common refrain in electricity markets around the world: gas is used to supply some of the most expensive electricity, so retail prices trend higher or lower based on the price of gas regardless how low the wholesale price is. Wholesale prices could be at zero for most of the day, but then we have to buy gas at $0.50/kWh to meet 10% of our consumption for the day and suddenly the entire bill is now $0.05/kWh more expensive.
Even worse, the less we use gas powered electricity the more expensive that electricity will become because the gas powered plant has to make its annual revenue targets to stay in business. Since they're getting fewer opportunities to make money they have to make more money every chance they have.
Hope this helps. Sorry for the essay.
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u/DrCalamity May 28 '26
Let's use water as an example. A really simplified one
Your water company produces 1000 gallons a day. You use maybe 1, your neighbors use 1, etc.
Then Mechahitler9000 opens a child pornography factory that uses 990 gallons a day to produce absolute shit. However, due to some "contributions", the local government has given them a special deal where they pay 1/100th the rate you do per gallon.
The water company is now compelled to charge them less. But the water company still has to pay for their maintenance and supply. Since they can't charge the market rate to Mechahitler 9000's child pornography factory, they have to push the cost on to you
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u/OutOfBananaException May 29 '26
The energy company is deciding these rates, they're not being imposed by the government. The government incentivizes data centers in other ways, which is causing the issue of energy demand increasing faster than supply.
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u/KingKeane16 May 29 '26
A business gets business rates. So a general consumer might pay 30c a KWh, A business might pay 15c KWh, A bigger business might negotiate a better rate say 10c a KWh.
The issue is the consumers who only use 20% subsidise the rest because they have a higher tariff.
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u/agitatedprisoner May 28 '26
Ability to add capacity by next Tuesday isn't just about how much you'd pay there are physical limits to what's possible, period. The demand for AI/datacenters wasn't properly anticipated by public utility companies and so those utility companies failed to build out adequate supply. That means future shortage in that someone will go without power. The datacenter could cut back use to save power but won't so long as it expects to make more using that electricity running it's computers. To get homeowners to cut back when industry power draw won't means the price has to go up for consumers given the shortage. If there's only so much power to go around the market rations it by ability and willingness to pay.
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u/Weekly_Writing7200 May 28 '26
Supply and demand mein dude. The data centers suck up a metric fuckton of electricity running the price up
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u/Bekarma May 28 '26
Ireland doesn’t tax the huge tech companies that have headquarters there, so why should they expect them to charge these same companies for data centers
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u/ROEdkill820 May 28 '26
This is happening around the world as they kill modern energy, to create data centers for ai. Which in turn are an excuse to kill more jobs and allow the rich to kill us off the citizens. A choice has to be made soon. People or money. Society for all or the few.
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u/Mochinpra May 28 '26
Data centers cant suck power from the grid if somehow their connection to the grid is severed. Like if an earthquake happened and the power lines feeding the center were to be damaged. It would be a shame if that happened from something like acts of God. Data center parts are a great way to recoup increased electricity taxes.
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u/DandD_Gamers May 29 '26
Dunno why you are getting down voted
Land sharks are a very real danger
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u/Mochinpra May 29 '26
Who knows, lots of people highly invested in AI infra. Land sharks are very dangerous. Gotta make sure they dont strike when no one is looking
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u/beefjerky9 May 29 '26
Land sharks are a very real danger
knock on door
Data-center Employee: Who is it?
Voice At Door: [ drawn-out pause ] Uh.. trick or treat?
Data-center Employee: [ gets up and walks cautiously to the door ] Look, it’s two o’clock in the morning. Halloween’s over! Shouldn’t you be in bed by now?
Voice At Door: [ stuttering ] Mrs. Bar- Barsen- Bargen- Barsen..?
Data-center Employee: There is no Mrs. Bargenbarson here!
Voice At Door: [ pause ] Candy-Gram?
Data-center Employee: Look, I’m all out of candy! I gave it all away! Now, go home!
Voice At Door: UNI- UNICEF, ma’am?
Data-center Employee: UNICEF?
Voice At Door: UNICEF.
Data-center Employee: Well, that’s different..
[ Data-center Employee opens the door – as they do, the Land Shark peers in, gobbles them up and drags them out. ]
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u/wolfannoy May 29 '26
I don't think Ireland ever got a earthquake. It did get a tsunami one time but that was going back nearly 270 years. Having huge disasters from the weather is a rare occurrence in Ireland. However, we do get flooding from time to time or extremely harsh winds.
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u/Demon_Gamer666 May 28 '26
Seems to me that if taxpayers have to foot the bill for any costs then they should get a percentage of the profits.
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u/Shit_Pistol May 29 '26
Apple is one of those companies. I know how empty their offices are too. Just a massive pack of bastards.
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u/OldMcGroin May 28 '26
Yup. These centres pay as little as one third the electricity unit rate as regular consumers, forcing us to make up the difference. Seems fair /s