The Impact of Data Centers on Ireland`s Energy network

“Research explaining the dissatisfaction of the Irish population or a negative example of an attempt to improve the country's economy by reducing the tax rate for large businesses.”

The project result.

What it is about

Ireland attracted global IT giants with a tax rate of 12.5% but became a hostage to “digital fever.” Today, data centers consume 21% of the country's total electricity ─ more than all urban homes combined. This has led to an increase in tariffs for the population to €0.40 per kWh, one of the highest in the EU. Residents are outraged: while corporations save on taxes, citizens must pay for network upgrades and put up with the threat to the environment, which suffers from huge CO2 emissions and heat pollution from servers. Despite its image as a “green” hub, Ireland gets more than 45% of its energy from fossil fuels. While the population saves every watt for the sake of the climate, corporations are nullifying these efforts by burning gas. Our main aim was to show when this problem got out of hand and try to visualize it.

How we built it

We have created our initial layer of data centers with scraped information from Baxtel, DataCenterMap and Inflect.com. Large companies, particularly Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, are often not transparent in sharing sensitive information. It required a lot of data parsing and analysis since the energy consumption and the sizes of Data Centers didn’t add up. For energy numbers we have used open-source information from The Irish Central Statistical Office, Sustainable Energy Authority Of Ireland, International Energy Agency. The Infographic with charts were created in web app Infogram.com. The map was created with ArcGIS and CorelDRAW.

Challenges we ran into

Our creative ideas were shattered by the lack of information, but we never gave up and tried to find workarounds. We found a way to automatically parse information about the geographical location of data centers from various websites. However, all the other attributes were written manually from different sources, creating our own unique database.

What we're proud of

We are proud that we have stayed true to our original purpose and have not strayed toward “quick fix” solutions. We managed to find information about 46 existing and 27 planned data centers hubs (with 144 buildings total) and calculate the anthropogenic impact of each of them on the region's ecology.

What we learned

The main thing we gained was the technical skill of parsing data from the website, as well as learning new graphic editors for designing posters. Both of us found inspiration online and managed to seamlessly implement our dream design through GIS and illustrating applications.

What's next

We would certainly like to suggest that industrial giants open access to the characteristics of their Data Centers, because everything that is hidden will eventually become apparent. If this happens, it will be possible to review the maps of pollution and energy distribution among consumers.