The Green Party has called for data centres to shoulder the cost of modernising and expanding Ireland's electricity grid, rather than households.

Deputy leader and party spokesperson for infrastructure and public expenditure, Cllr Hazel Chu, said a targeted levy on the sector should finance these upgrades, which are currently recovered through consumer bills.

Chu said: "Data centres are consuming a quarter of our electricity, it is time they paid their fair share. Irish households should not be subsidising the massive energy consumption of tech giants. In the last five years, data centres added on average €360 to household bills and from October the CCPC says we'll all have to pay €41.25 each year to pay for costs of building, maintaining, and upgrading Ireland's electricity infrastructure. If you consume enormous amounts of the country's energy, you should make an appropriate contribution towards the cost."

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Outlining the plan, Cllr Chu said the charge would apply to both electricity and gas used by data centres, she stated: "We are proposing an electricity consumption levy of €0.011/kWh on electricity consumed by data centres. Based on a similar system that was recently introduced in Virginia in July, this would raise approximately €84 million per year on current consumption, before accounting for future growth. And to go one step further than Virginia we are putting a levy on gas consumption too.

"Gas Networks Ireland data shows that large non-power users consumed almost 8.9 TWh of gas in 2025. Yet we don't even know how much of that gas is being consumed by data centres, that is simply unacceptable. The Commission for Regulation of Utilities is now warning that new very large industrial users, primarily data centres and electricity generators, could have a major impact on Ireland's gas security. If Ireland has to plan, reinforce and protect its energy infrastructure because of these enormous new demands, the companies creating that demand should pay towards it. That money would be ringfenced to pay for the improvements to the national grid that are necessary because of data centre expansion here."