The State needs to take the lead on data centre policy in order to ensure the ongoing strength of the wider digital infrastructure industry here, according to the chair of Digital Infrastructure Ireland.
Reacting to the Commission for the Regulation of Utilities proposed rules for new data centres in Ireland, announced earlier this week, Maurice Mortell said a “steady hand” was needed to “navigate through the inertia” that the sector is seeing at the moment.
“I don’t think the CRU has the tools to do that at the moment – I think they’re quite blunt.” he said. “They can only do certain things with what they have. That’s why I think we need a State-led response to this issue.
“We don’t see any real ambition, leadership or direction around Ireland’s digital infrastructure future,” said Mr Mortell.
Digital Infrastructure Ireland has today announced a merger with another data centre and digital infrastructure representative group, Host in Ireland. The two organisations said a combined voice would better allow it to “champion industry growth and policy advocacy”.
One of the big issues facing the industry at the moment is the moratorium on new data centre connections, which has halted plans for future facilities here.
The CRU proposals announced this week are part of an attempt to allow connections once again – and included a requirement that future centres would be able to generate their own energy – and potentially supply that to the grid.
Mr Mortell said this could offer a short-term fix to a problem – but questioned whether it was in anyone’s interests for data centres to become energy suppliers.
Overall, he said the CRU rules were a small step in the right direction, but the industry still had a number of unanswered questions.
“There’s a lot of challenges still and a lot of questions to be answered in what the CRU brought out this week,” he said. “I don’t think the industry the industry is that happy with the paper – this is the third paper that the CRU has brought out in the last three years and there’s still very, very little movement in getting connections onto the grid.”
He accepted that the CRU had a difficult task in trying to balance the competing priorities of climate action goals, digitisation, security of energy supply and Ireland’s digital economic future. There are also many other areas where change is needed in order for progress to be made on the issue.
To address that DII wants the various stakeholders to be brought together in order to make progress on issues like these as quickly as possible.
“We’ve been talking earlier to ministers before the Programme for Government around bringing together a taskforce if we can,” Mr Mortell said. “To get the system operators, energy providers, technology companies, the respective ministers to sit together around a table… and really iron what the issues are and see if we can get some movement in the system.”