Ciarán Ahern warns AI energy use threatens climate goals

I welcome that we're having this debate. I think now and in the years to come, AI and how we effectively use and regulate it will be one of the key challenges we face as legislators. As my colleague Deputy Lawler has said, there is enormous potential for AI to have a really transformative and positive impact for workers if it is applied in a fair manner and if everyone can benefit from it. It's crucial that AI doesn't just become another way for big business to bump up their profits. I echo Deputy Lawler's point that we must take a human-centred approach to all of this and I want to focus my remarks on the climate element in the debate around AI. It has been suggested by some in the tech sector that AI has a massive role to play in helping us address the climate crisis, that the positives of AI will outweigh the negatives. I don't doubt that it certainly can have some impact in helping us with things like tracking extreme weather events or identifying areas of environmental or biodiversity concern, but I'm not sold on the idea that AI is the answer to all of our climate problems. The core issue right now is whether these potentially positive applications of AI outweigh the negatives in terms of the level of energy use it consumes. The reality is that using an AI tool like ChatGPT takes an enormous amount of energy. A search on ChatGPT takes approximately 10 times the amount of energy than a Google search. AI is proliferating rapidly and with it the ever-growing need for data centres. We really do need to concern ourselves with the amount of energy it uses and how this affects not just our energy security, not just the cost of electricity for ordinary people, but also our climate ambitions. It is in this context that I was extremely concerned with the proposed new rules regarding data centres published by the CRU yesterday. Quite frankly, the new rules seem to fly in the face of our climate goals. Ideally, and this is something we in the Labour Party have proposed and have called for consistently, we would have a moratorium on new data centres, at least until such time that we can be sure that they won't pose a threat to our grid and put pressure on our grid or pose a threat to our climate targets. Nonetheless, though, the government does seem content to plough ahead with them. It is certainly welcome that data centres will be required to power themselves rather than taking power from the national grid, but it is hugely concerning that there is nothing in the proposed rules to state that the power sources for data centres must be from clean, renewable, sustainable sources. We know that data centres consume enormous amounts of energy and currently 50 per cent of the electricity produced in Dublin is going to data centres. More than a fifth of the total amount of electricity used in Ireland is going to data centres, and that number is projected to grow up to 30 per cent in the next few years. That is more electricity usage than all of the homes in the country, yet there is nothing in these draft rules to state that data centres must be powered with clean energy. What is stopping data centres from importing and using more dirty fuel at precisely the time we should be moving away from this? The CRU must clarify in these finalised rules that data centres have to power themselves using sustainable renewable sources. The growth in AI use will inevitably mean that the already high consumption of energy in data centres grows further, and so proper regulatory and legislative frameworks must be put in place now to ensure that they do not impact on our vital climate targets. In the brief time I have left, I want to add that given the Government is intent or seems intent on green lighting more data centres, we want to start looking seriously at using the waste heat that they generate, and the Tala district heating scheme in my own constituency in Dublin South West uses waste heat from a nearby data centre to heat council buildings and the TUD Tala campus. It has been hugely successful, so the model is already there, and it is welcome that plans are in place in South Dublin County Council to roll out district heating in more areas and to start heating affordable homes elsewhere in the constituency. We need to see more of that, and I would urge the Government to use the Tala model to roll out district heating and heat capture from data centres to other areas. Thank you.