15/09/2026 in News, Views from Echelon

If you follow news about data centres in Ireland, you will have seen the phrase “Green Energy Park” turning up. The Government and Echelon use it to describe what we are building at DUB20 in Arklow.

Simply put, a Green Energy Park is a place where a very large electricity user, such as a data centre, is planned and built together with the renewable power that supplies it, plus the storage and backup needed to keep it running when the wind drops. The pieces are designed as one system from the start, not built separately and connected across the country.

In 2025 the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment published an independent economic assessment of the Green Energy Park concept, carried out by GDG and Glic. It set out three characteristics: a park should co-locate a large energy user with renewable generation; it should have some degree of self-sufficiency, so it is not over-reliant on the national grid; and it should run primarily on renewable energy, with a path to net zero or a low emissions threshold.

Ireland’s electricity grid works a bit like a road network: power is generated in one place and carried to where it is used, and the busiest routes get congested. Most Irish data centres were built around Dublin, where demand was already heavy, and the Government assessment argues that future development should be spread more evenly across the regions.

Building a large user, like a data centre, right beside new generation, like a large wind farm means that less power travels long distances, connection infrastructure is shared and the developer brings new renewable supply with it rather than drawing on existing supply. The assessment concluded that Green Energy Parks would use the grid more efficiently than placing supply and demand in separate locations, while being clear that wider grid investment is still needed.

Within the Green Energy Park is renewable generation, wind or solar, battery storage, which smooths the ups and downs of renewable output over minutes and hours and backup generation for longer gaps. However, batteries alone can’t get a site through a prolonged windless, overcast spell, so some dispatchable capacity is needed and under the regulator’s rules it must be able to support the wider system too.

A substation needs to be developed where generation, demand and storage all meet the transmission network. At the centre sits the anchor tenant, in the case of Green Energy Parks, whose steady demand makes the rest of the investment possible.

Since December 2025 the Commission for Regulation of Utilities has required new data centres to match their grid connection with generation or storage and to meet at least 80% of their annual electricity demand from new renewable projects in Ireland within six years of connecting. Generation already supported by existing State schemes does not count.

Echelon’s DUB20 campus is being built on the former Irish Fertiliser Industries site at Avoca River Business Park in Arklow, Co Wicklow. In March 2026 it was announced it as Ireland’s first Green Energy Park under development, aligned with the Government’s Large Energy Users Action Plan and the Minister for Climate, Energy and the Environment described it as an example of the model the plan is meant to deliver.

A joint 220kV substation, developed with SSE Renewables, is designed to connect the campus to the transmission system and provide a route for power from the proposed Arklow Bank Wind Park 2, which SSE describes as an 800MW+ project. Two onsite energy centres are planned, one capable of exporting power to the national grid when renewable output is low, with the potential to run on hydrotreated vegetable oil to reduce emissions, when available. Construction is under way, with completion expected by 2028.

The Government assessment identified data centres as a key anchor tenant for Green Energy Parks because they solve a problem for offshore wind. Wind developers need a large, reliable customer to make a project bankable, and data centres need large, reliable, low-carbon power to keep locating in Ireland. National policy targets 5GW of offshore wind by 2030 and 37GW by 2050 and reaching those numbers needs customers for the power.

The same report points to former industrial sites with existing grid infrastructure as the natural home for these parks. Arklow is exactly that: a legacy industrial site put back to productive use, bringing jobs and new transmission infrastructure that serves the region as well as the campus.

Ireland needs data centres for its digital economy and it needs to build a great deal of renewable energy quickly. A Green Energy Park asks the first to help deliver the second. That is what DUB20 is set up to prove.