Ireland is a major site for data centres in the EU and they will soon consume up to a third of all electricity. Now we discover they are not even paying their bills.
Meta owns a huge data centre in Clonee but they have only been paying a tiny part of their electricity bill for 18 months. The ESB management claim that they did not notice.
The Clonee data centre uses the same amount of electricity as 150,000 homes. But while the government imposes carbon taxes on ordinary people, it turns a blind eye to the data centres that are soaking up energy.
Worse, data centres are not even paying their bills. The Clonee centre paid only 7% of their bill.
We need to stop this farce. Let’s halt the construction of data centres and make them pay a supercharge for electricity used.
