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While officials in Ireland were blaming data centers for causing an energy crisis so severe that it might cause electricity blackouts in its capital city of Dublin, two-thirds of power they had reserved for data centers went unused according to investigation done by Data Center Knowledge.

Ireland ordered its booming data center industry to halt construction in Dublin. The capital city has become the world's largest net exporter of IT services, after its state-owned electricity bodies said the data center industry's growth was unreasonable and disproportionate to other industries that were not growing as well.

Related: Big Tech Data Centers Get Caught Up in Europe’s Energy Politics

Irish officials used power demand to deny approvals for any new projects around Dublin. The only exception were for new data centers that also built small power stations onsite, with enough generating capacity to cover their entire demand for electricity. This allowed state-owned grid operator EirGrid to switch off the data centers’ power supplies when its grid reached critical mass.

While EirGrid and the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU), Ireland's electricity market regulator, conceded that their aging electricity grid was inadequate to guarantee Ireland's growing power needs, they said this situation only exacerbated a problem  created by data center power demands, and justified sanctions they subsequently imposed.

Related: Is Sensible Green Data Center Regulation Even Possible in the EU?

Yet Ireland's data centers used only 25% of their reserved grid capacity last year. In other words, even while they shouldered the burden of keeping society and economy running digitally during the world's lockdown against the coronavirus.

The insight was made in Data Center Knowledge estimates, based on data that describes the total power capacity that grid operators contracted to data centers in 2021. Though EirGrid used those numbers to justify its sanctions, it has never published nor was it prepared to release the data when asked for it by Data Center Knowledge.

Maurice Mortell, Ireland country manager and EU sustainability chief at global data center operator Equinix, said it was true that data centers used only about 25% of the grid capacity that Ireland's two state-owned grid operators reserve for them.

"[EirGrid's] initial story was inaccurate from the start, and unfortunately it stayed that way,” he said.

Irish electricity regulator CRU nevertheless published the data when it satisfied EirGrid's demand to sanction data centers with a regulatory decree last November. Combined with scant statements of data center power demand that EirGrid has used when lobbying for sanctions, and compared with a landmark study of the actual metered electricity consumption of data centers, published last month by the Irish Central Statistics Office, it is possible to determine the extraordinarily large amount of power that data centers are not using.

Data Centers a Scape Goat For Energy Crisis

Ireland's power problem was caused not by data centers but "a lack of investment in its grid infrastructure, particularly around Dublin, and lagging investment in renewable energy", said Mortell.

Max Ahman, an environment academic known for studies of data center power consumption at Lund University, Sweden, said his own research reached similar conclusions about the amount of allotted power data centers actually use.

Bob Hanna, consultant electrical engineer and chair of Smart Grid Ireland, said: "Data centers are not the ogre that some sectors of society are saying they are.” He said an effort the Irish government announced this month to procure emergency electricity over the winter might not even be necessary.

The point was made in submissions to a CRU consultation on the proposed sanctions last year, that the system by which Ireland's two state grid operators, EirGrid and ESB Networks, reserve power capacity for data centers, was broken and needed reforming, because it left too much capacity unused, and created the impression of a crisis when there was none.

Ireland's Industrial Development Agency (IDA) told the consultation that EirGrid overstated data center demand because data centers used less energy than it reserved for them, and because speculators hogged capacity they weren't using.

Cloud Infrastructure Ireland, which represents cloud computing suppliers with big data centers in Ireland, told the consultation that the large amount of under-utilised power capacity reserved for data centers was strong evidence of the need to reform the system by which it was allotted.

It and other data center and electricity grid experts called for reform of the wider electricity market as well, the need for which was demonstrated by the country's failure to produce enough generating capacity to meet people's growing needs as industry and society digitalised and decarbonised. The Irish Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment implied that EirGrid was using data centers as a "scapegoat" for its problems securing the country's electricity supply.

Microsoft, a cloud computing company with Ireland data centers, called in the consultation for grid operators to charge more money for capacity reservations that went unused.

Electricity and data center industry representatives testified that speculators were hogging Ireland's grid capacity with power reservations for data centers they might never build. But these reservations, called Maximum Import Capacity (MIC), were the basis of EirGrid's argument that data centers had left it short of power.

A spokesman for EirGrid insisted the primary cause of Ireland's energy crisis was the "unprecedented" growth of data centers, particularly in Dublin where power shortages were most severe.

But he conceded that when Ireland came close to running out of electricity last year -- when a failing wind left it short of renewable energy -- it was also short of other power sources due to shuttering old fossil fuel power plants in sustainability efforts.

"It's not just the grid itself, it's do we physically have enough generators to feed [data center demand] as well," he said.

Data Centers Taking the Regulation Heat

David McAuley, an Irish research consultant, said EirGrid had tendered some botched investments in generating capacity and been left without enough power to supply the steadily growing demand of a data center industry that had been predicted for years.

"The grid has failed to deliver capacity for the predicted increase in demand for data centers. And now we've seen in all the press this year, 'if it wasn't for these data centers, we wouldn't have this problem'," he said.

But EirGrid had been forced to take measures to prevent data centers making any more reservations for grid capacity because it would not be able to deliver them, he said.

The sanctions that CRU imposed in November cancelled nearly 2500 MW of outstanding reservation requests that EirGrid and ESB had received from data centers in recent years. That was more than twice as much capacity as they already held in reservation for existing data centers. EirGrid did not say how much of requested capacity was usually speculative, nor how much was ever realised. But its own statements on its management of data center power claim it could take 10 years for data centers to use up a 1000 MW of capacity that had been reserved for them, as they often built their computing infrastructure gradually.

Datacenter MIC was not a problem for the electricity market, EirGrid said in its 2020 consultation on data center grid connections, because there was a "significant gap" between electricity actually used by data centers and the MIC it reserved for them. EirGrid has reported that all big industry Ireland uses only about 30% of the electricity capacity reserved for it. It was not prepared to release data by sector when asked.

"EirGrid is being a bit disingenuous. It's trying to deflect the blame on somebody else," said John Booth, chair of the British Standards Institute committee on data center design, and a consultant with strong views about the need for more energy efficient data centers.

The energy market should be reformed to make data centers free up unused capacity, he said.

"The plain fact is there's not enough infrastructure to support projected reserve power in place places where they want to build datacenters. That's the problem ultimately. Ireland doesn't generate enough power to cover its existing demand," he said.

A Game of Dirty Politics and Posturing

Adrian Bolton, head of distributed energy at renewables supplier SSE, said he believed EirGrid had over-estimated data center demand and under-estimated the grid's supply capacity, and that bolstered its case for sanctions against political opposition from other government departments and agencies. Ireland was short of power because EirGrid had not fulfilled its commitments to build enough generating capacity, he said.

Both electric and data center industry representatives have warned that, by forbidding any new data centers that did not build their own onsite power stations, it was forcing data centers to build gas power plants, creating a greater dependence on fossil fuels when Ireland and the rest of the world was trying to cut their use to slow the unfolding environmental catastrophe of global warming. Ireland is also planning to replace fossil gas-powered systems with green hydrogen generated by a planned expansion of offshore wind.

Martin Murphy, chairman of both Ulster Bank and Echelon Datacentres, a firm building renewable generators to mix hydrogen with fossil fuels for gas-fired data centers it is building in Dublin, said: "The debate over who is using what, and how much, has now moved into a new era, of an energy self-sufficient data center sector". Echelon promotes fossil gas as a medium-term fix to take pressure off the grid and cut electricity generation from dirtier fossil fuels while Ireland builds its renewable capacity.