WHAT DO DATA centres have to do with your electricity bill? About €1.4 billion worth, according to new research, which reveals how data centres have been driving up the wholesale price of electricity in Ireland through rising and constant demand on our grid.

The research — written by Dr Seán Fearon and commissioned by Friends of the Earth and Beyond Fossil Fuels — lays bare the impact of Ireland’s open-door policy on data centres in recent decades. Between 2015 and 2023, the data centre price effect meant households in Ireland paid an estimated €715 million extra for their electricity, or an average of €263 per household.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 marked the worst of these years. The new research, “The Cost of Data Centres: Modelling the Household Electricity Costs of Ireland’s Data Centre Sector”, shows that during this period, data centres inflated the cost of already rocketing wholesale electricity prices, increasing households’ bills by 8.5% in 2022 alone.

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Between 2021 and 2023, data centres’ energy use exploded by a third, growing from a 14% share of the island’s electricity system in 2021 to 21% in 2023.

The impact was hardest for households on lower incomes. Anyone who was on social welfare during these years paid an extra €209 between 2021 and 2023, the equivalent of a week’s income, to service this data centre price effect.

This, in effect, wrote off the social welfare increase that people received in 2022, a vital household income that should have gone towards food, bus fares, clothes and school supplies, but was instead drained from the Irish........

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