22/07/2026 in News, Views from Echelon

With a six-week hosepipe ban in place across Dublin, Wicklow and four other counties, it is reasonable that people query how much water large facilities consume and data centres have featured prominently in that conversation. However, the figures driving much of the public concern come from evaporative cooling systems that deliberately evaporate large volumes of water to carry heat away. That approach made sense for an earlier generation of facilities, and it remains common in hotter climates, but it is not how modern data centres in Ireland are built.

Modern data centres, including Echelon’s, are engineered around closed-loop and air-based cooling, with minimal operational water usage. In a closed-loop system, the same water circulates continuously through sealed pipework, much like a refrigerator, absorbing heat and releasing it externally, rather than being evaporated and replaced. Air-based cooling goes further still, using outside air to reject heat directly. Ireland’s temperate climate is exactly the environment in which these designs perform best and it is one of the quiet advantages of building digital infrastructure here.

The national picture reflects this as Uisce Éireann confirmed in July that data centres account for less than 0.3% of the drinking water it supplies, noting that advances in cooling technology mean modern facilities use relatively small volumes of water and that a number of operators do not draw on the public network at all, using wells, rainwater harvesting and on-site storage instead. To put the sector’s reported daily usage of roughly 4.78 million litres in context, Uisce Éireann produces around 1.7 billion litres of water every day.

Water, like power, is shared infrastructure and the same principle applies to both. Good grid citizenship does not stop at the substation; it requires the design of facilities that place the lightest practical demand on the systems communities rely on.

That is the standard Echelon builds to and the standard we believe the public is entitled to expect from our industry.