In Coolock, a missed opportunity for a lower-cost, lower-carbon heating system for the area

On Monday morning about 11am, Steve Boland is on his way out of the Lidl on Clonshaugh Road, walking to his car, parked just out front.

Behind the shop looms a massive data centre: it looks like a warehouse, grey and white.

Dublin City Council granted Clonmont Developments permission in May 2019 to build it. An April 2023 image on Google Street View shows cranes at work.

Now it looks complete. “I was impressed how fast they threw it up,” Boland says. “I like the way they finished it, too.”

Inside data centres like this one are rows and rows of computers, basically, where things like your emails and photos are stored. In the same way your phone or laptop gets hot when you use it, these computers get hot too.

There are several data centres in the Clonshaugh Business and Technology Park. And Aileen Malone wants to know whether they can share their waste heat with the neighbourhood – sending it through pipes to people’s radiators.

It’s been done in Tallaght, after all, and there’s a scheme like this in planning for part of Blanchardstown too. So why not Coolock too?

“These are within 600 metres of my home as the crow flies,” she said. “Wouldn’t it have made sense to insist on district heating when these centres were being planned so as to benefit the local area of Coolock?”

Maps from Codema, Dublin’s energy agency, years ago identified this area as densely populated enough for such a system, and highlighted these data centres as a possible source of waste heat.

But there’s no district heating scheme in the works for this area, and it looks like the data centres aren’t set up for one – and a big potential user isn’t either.

When it comes to district heating, Dublin City Council is instead focused on plans to pipe heat from the Poolbeg waste incinerator to nearby businesses and homes, including those planned for the Glass Bottle site, a spokesperson said.

Potential

A 2015 analysis of which parts of Dublin city have enough demand for heat, in a tightly packed area, to be good candidates for a district heating scheme, shows areas near the Clonshaugh business park that might work.

The study found that more than 70 percent of “small areas”, a geographic unit used by the census, in Dublin are suitable for district heating.

The study’s heat density map for the area shows the areas surrounding the Clonshaugh data centres – Coolock, Beaumont and Santry – coloured in patches of yellow, orange and red, depending on how dense the heat demand is.

It says that Danish municipalities consider “any areas measuring above 150TJ/km2 deemed technically and economically suitable for developing conventional DH [district heating] systems”.

On the 2015 Codema study’s map, those are the orange and red bits, including parts of Coolock, Beaumont and Santry.

Places needing lots of heat, like industrial buildings, hospitals, or swimming pools add to the economic viability of district heating schemes, according to Codema.

Across the Clonshaugh Road from the business park are the Northside Shopping Centre, the council’s Coolock swimming pool, and Coolock Community College.

Beaumont Hospital is less than a kilometre away. So is Oscar Traynor Woods, where developer Glenveagh has permission to build over 850 social and “affordable” homes.

Another Codema map highlights the data centres in the Clonshaugh business park as potential sources of waste heat for district heating.

(Although, some have raised concerns about how permanent a feature of Dublin data centres will be, and whether it’s a good idea to base long-term infrastructure like a district heating scheme around them.)

Policy

Dublin City Council’s development plan for 2022 to 2028, which sets out the council’s vision for what should be built where and how, says it’ll encourage district heating.

It’s a good way to reduce carbon emissions by getting people and businesses off oil-fueled or gas-fired boilers, and onto a system that can use waste heat, or electricity generated from renewable sources, rather than fossil fuels.

So it’s the council’s policy, its development plan says, “To actively encourage the development of low carbon and highly efficient district heating and decentralised energy systems across the city utilising low carbon heat sources such as renewable energy and waste heat recovery.”

“New development should generally demonstrate/ provide for: … h. connection to (existing and planned) decentralised energy networks including the Dublin District Heating System where feasible,” it says.

Meanwhile, on the supply side, the Codema spokesperson said that “New data centres are required to submit waste heat reports with their planning applications and to install heat recovery equipment if there is a DH [district heating] network either planned or existing in close proximity.”

There is European Union policy on this. Its Energy Efficiency Directive will require that data centres “make use of their waste heat unless they can show that it is not technically or economically feasible,” the Codema spokesperson said.

“This is prompting more and more data centres to seek out such opportunities to share waste heat,” she said.

Focused elsewhere

However, there is no existing district heating network for the area around the Clonshaugh business park, and there does not seem to be one in planning either.

Codema is focused on the one for Blanchardstown, its spokesperson said. “The development of this network is being progressed by Fingal County Council and has the support of a number of significant heat customers in the area.”

And Dublin City Council is perpetually planning its Dublin District Heating Scheme, which would deliver heat from the Poolbeg incinerator to surrounding areas. Its plan for what it intends to build in 2023 to 2025, says the project “has been beset by delays”.

“We now expect to go to the market in early 2023 with construction starting in early 2024,” this capital programme says. But it didn’t.

Instead, the council has been in extensive discussions with the Department of Environment “to ensure that the appropriate funding, regulatory and legislative supports” are there for the city to “deliver a sustainable and commercially viable project”, a council spokesperson said.

In the meantime, the team is working on design for the district heating pipe distribution network and associated energy centre, said the spokesperson. The council intends to take that through the approvals process in 2025, subject to funding, and the necessary regulatory and legislative supports being in place, they said.

The team is also working with the developers within the Poolbeg West strategic development zone, who will imminently be installing pipe infrastructure within the Irish Glass Bottle site, they said. This will be followed by the installation of further sections in 2025, said the spokesperson.

The development there will be built in phases, the developer’s website says. “When fully realised, Glass Bottle will create approximately 3,800 new homes,” it says, 75 percent market-rent housing, 15 percent “affordable” and 10 percent social housing.

Plus 90,000 square metres of “office and enterprise space”, it says.

Missed opportunity?

While the council and Codema are focused elsewhere, the data centres in Clonshaugh have already been built, and there’s an effective moratorium on new data centres for Dublin – for the moment at least.

“Existing DCs [data centres] would represent a significant proportion of the DCs in the area,” the Codema spokesperson said.

This creates an obstacle to using their waste heat for a district heating scheme, says Neil O’Leary, a senior energy engineer at Codema. “It is often cost prohibitive to retrofit heat recovery technology into existing data centres,” O’Leary said.

District heating “schemes which have successfully used data centre waste heat are generally developed in tandem with a new data centre i.e., the heat recovery equipment is installed during the construction phase,” he said.

The Codema spokesperson said similar. “Due to security concerns and strict rules around downtime for data centres it can be challenging for existing data centres to install heat recovery equipment,” she said.

Aileen Malone, who lives not far from the Clonshaugh business park, says “Wouldn’t it have made sense to insist on district heating when these centres were being planned so as to benefit the local area of Coolock?”

Likewise, a possible nearby user of this waste heat – the Oscar Traynor Woods development – does not seem to have been built with a view to a future connection to a future district heating system, according to planning documents.

One document discusses how Dublin City Council’s development as saying planning applications for strategic development regeneration areas (SDRAs) such as the Docklands and north-east inner-city “must demonstrate how a proposed development is District Heating Enabled”.

“Guidance is also set out” for the SDRAs at Heuston Station, Grangegorman, St Teresa’s Gardens, St James’s Hospital, and Liberties/Newmarket areas, it says, “where possible connections or interconnections to existing heat networks in the area, to create a district heating ‘node’ must be investigated”.

There is no such guidance, however, for the SDRA that the Oscar Traynor Woods development is in, it says.

The developer’s Residential Climate Action Energy Statement notes and quotes the council’s policy of promoting district heating. It also examines the potential use of district heating for Oscar Traynor Woods.

First it explains the benefits of such a system (“convenient and sustainable”) and how it would work. “Each building which uses this heat will have a heat exchanger which connects it to the city’s District Heating network.”

“District Heating was considered however given the site location of the proposed development District Heating systems deemed unfeasible,” this report says.

Frustration

Energy Minister Eamon Ryan, the Green Party TD, in May launched a report commissioned by the Irish District Energy Association that found that “district energy is the most cost-effective technology for 61% of small areas, 64% of the Irish population, and 67% of all building heat demand”.

“It’s dreadful the way disadvantaged areas are expected to take all the things that affluent areas reject and yet receive none of the benefits,” says Aileen Malone, who lives not far from the Clonshaugh business park.

Over across the M50 in Santry too, Anne O’Rourke, secretary of the Santry Forum, says residents there would also have liked to be hooked up to a district heating system using waste heat from the data centres. “We need it too!” she said.

The Dublin City Council spokesperson said the council is “aware of interest” in developing “ schemes utilising waste heat from Data Centres and other waste or renewable heat sources within Dublin City Council’s functional areas”.

“Dublin City Council is focussed on utilising the waste heat from the Dublin Waste to Energy Facility [in Poolbeg] as part of phase 1 of the DH [district heating] scheme and is not developing other schemes at present,” she said.