What will it take for the Government to recognise that inviting in big tech to set up as many data centres as they want, to use huge amounts of electricity and water, is simply not a sustainable policy? The Government is now being warned by officials in the Department of enterprise that this is not sustainable. Colm McCarthy has said the data centre boom is using up the entire bonus to emission reductions that would otherwise be under way as wind and solar renewables are deployed. The Minister has been warned there will not be enough renewable energy to meet demand from data centres. We have more data centres per capita than anywhere else in the world. We have 82 at present and we will head towards having more than 100. They provide very few jobs and use up one fifth of all our electricity. If we continue to add more and more electricity demand in the form of these data centres, we will not achieve a shift to renewable energy. When will the Government recognise this?

In terms of focusing on just one aspect of this challenge, we should focus on the broader picture. There are two fundamental challenges, digitalisation and decarbonisation, which we must try to reconcile.

Whether we like it or not, data centres are a necessary infrastructure for many of the services we now take for granted, including technological advances such as cloud computing, quantum computing and artificial intelligence, and the rapid growth of the use of Internet services by enterprises, consumers and political parties, by the way, which are increasingly driven by data, data analytics and so on. However, we have to do it within the context of the climate challenge. In terms of the construction of data centres, that means a very strong focus on energy usage, corporate purchase power agreements, on-site renewables, demand flexibility, battery storage and other sustainable solutions to reduce the burden on the grid.