Firm Behind Ennis Data Centre Accused Of "Deception" And "Smoke And Mirrors"

0:00I'm terribly disappointed with the outcome of the judicial review and it has very serious consequences, not everyone for county clear, but for the whole country. I think that the general population probably doesn't realize just how vast this project is. That phase one of it will actually more than double the electricity demand in county clear. And the full data center will require about three times the electricity consumption that is currently in the case in county clear. So it's actually a massive draw on energy. And the finding by the court that dismissal of our case by the court was on totally legal grounds. That's it. In other words, they said that the planning commission was quite within its legal rights to find to grant permission for the data center, but what is legal is not necessarily right. And the judge can look into our he was actually precluded from looking into anything to do with the scale of the emissions from this data center, which will be really quite

1:02massive. There will be emissions of over half a million tons a year of greenhouse gases. And particularly disappointing part of the court judgment is that apparently, according to the law, it doesn't matter what the emissions are. The commission can grant permission for anything, regardless of the scale of the emissions that don't even have to take them into account. Now, that's a new development in climate law. We had thought that the climate act would give us grounds for the appeal, but that act was reinterpreted by the Supreme Court, which means that essentially the planning commission can do whatever it wants. And people will be aware that quite often they make decisions that don't make any sense. And this particular decision doesn't make any sense at all. Responding to the ruling last week, the co-founders of our data centers, Limsit, have said that the judgment recognizes that there's a future for environmentally sensitive data center developments like theirs, where there is responsible use of renewable energy, grid supporting generation technology, and heat recycling for both angry food and local heating

2:04schemes. What's your assessment of those comments? Well, first of all, the judgment didn't say that this was an anywhere environmentally sensitive. It said that the commission was within its legal rights to grant permission, as to the environmentally sensitive aspect, that's total nonsense. In country care, at the moment, we have greenhouse gas emissions of maybe 1.4 million tons or something, and this will add half a million tons to it. That can't be considered by any measure to be environmentally sensitive. Their use of renewable energy is just smoke and mirrors, it's a complete deception. What they're going to do is we're all aware that there's quite a bit of opposition to wind farms and solar farms even in some parts of the country, and there are a lot of these already have planning consent, and they're awaiting an opportunity to build. What the data center will do is go in and basically hijack all this renewable energy and say that it's theirs, and that they say that they're carbon neutral, but that's sort

3:05of nonsense. This new data center out at Cotter Road will have its own power plant burning natural gas. The emissions from the power plant alone will be close to half a million tons of greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere per year. They're trying to offset that by buying up all the renewable energy supply in the pipeline at the moment. In fact, the NIST data center would alone account for about one-third of all the renewable energy capacity that's currently awaiting access to the market. NIST data center isn't the only one who's chewing up, there are others lined up, such that between them, they will be able to easily absorb and hijack all of the renewable energy in the development pipeline, and then they have the second advantage is that if they do a power purchase agreement with wind farms and solar farms, they won't have to pay any carbon tax. So the carbon tax from the power generation in power plants in the country will have to

4:07be paid by the general electricity consumers, so the price of electricity is going to go up. Okay. So, that's the end of the consequences. As for the distritiating, that is Lord of Nonsense. We don't have a distritiating system in County Claire, and they will provide pipes to the boundary of the site, and then they will say, does anyone want this heat, which will require digging up the whole town, and then going to each household or business and saying, are you willing to pay 10,000, 15,000 euro to have the heat brought into your house? So it's not a simple answer. It's not right. It's not right. It's not true. The network, so to speak, there would need to be specific. Yes, specifically infrastructure for that, so that argument from them that their excess electricity could provide heat to 1,100 homes, that doesn't stand up in your view. It doesn't show. No, no, it doesn't. In fact, that number of houses that the estimators, that's actually a trivial use of the waste heat, but in practice, it won't even be achievable, because we know how much disruption

5:09there is, digging up roads, and the total road at present, since we've been dug up for side occupants. We know what it's been like in NS Town over the last couple of years, digging up roads. So what they would be hoping to do, as opposed to the council would bear the burden of this, because certainly private houses would not be inclined to spend 10,000, 15,000 euro to get any heating system that they didn't ask for. Is there a mechanism available to the likes of yourself and other appellans of this application now that the hurdles have been cleared and now that the development looks likely to go ahead? Is there any way that you can continue to voice your opposition or challenge this development? Well, other than voicing these concerns in the media, I think that it has simmered away in the background up to now, and I don't know if the general public has been aware of what's happening, and so we can just continue to speak the truth, and to point out the

6:12untruths in the James mid-by-Arch Descenters. The legal process is over for the moment as far as I know, but definitely depends on our legal team as to whether they can see if there's any option for taking it to a higher level, but I'm not a legal person, so I don't know about the options are there.