Facing our big Data Centre dilemma [Video]

With data centres accounting for 21% of electricity consumption in Ireland, environmentalists are warning of the implications for the country’s climate change targets, while technology experts argue that they are a vital piece of our economic landscape. Barry J Whyte talks to those on both sides of the argument

If you’ve ever ordered a pizza online, sent a meme via WhatsApp, bought a book from Amazon or streamed a television programme on Netflix, you’ve used The Cloud.

It’s a wonderfully vivid term, evoking images of enormous volumes of brainlike vapour, pulsing with electrical energy and formless expanses of data.

The Cloud is a much uglier, greyer and more pragmatic thing: a network of enormous warehouses filled to the brim with computers working together to process, store and distribute huge volumes of information fast and at scale, to allow us to live the digitised lives we enjoy today.

For Ireland, the reality of how much energy goes into maintaining The Cloud has become …