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Apple Scraps $1 Billion Irish Data Center Over Planning Delays (reuters.com)
Apple ditched plans to build an 850 million euro ($1 billion) data center in Ireland because of delays in the approval process that have stalled the project for more than three years, the iPhone maker said on Thursday. From a report: Apple announced plans in February 2015 to build the facility in the rural western town of Athenry to take advantage of green energy sources nearby, but a series of planning appeals, chiefly from two individuals, delayed its approval. Ireland's High Court ruled in October that the data center could proceed, dismissing the appellants who then took their case to the country's Supreme Court.
TFA article tells you crap about the complaints. Here's a much better article:
http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/design-build/apples-irish-data-center-faces-new-hearing/96069.fullarticle
"...objectors raise fears that it would flood golf course, and make inordinate demands on Ireland’s power grid."
"The full proposal would reduce the habitat of bats and badgers, say some objections, and the Bord has also received a complaint from Athenry Golf Club, 1km away from the site. 'Our primary concern is the totality of the proposed development, especially the extent of the proposed masterplan, and the potential this has to alter the hydrology of the local area and potentially increase the frequency and duration of flooding already experienced at the golf club,' says the golf club’s appeal"
It's not $1B to the local economy, it's a handful of medium pay jobs after the construction is complete, and because datacenters are so specialized the construction is usually handled by a firm that does nothing but plan and build them so you don't even get temporary construction jobs. From a land and resource usage perspective a datacenter is probably one of the worst candidates.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Horseshit. Datacenter creation involves a lot of concrete work, a lot of electrical installs, bathroom fixtures, lighting, offices, carpet, doors, loading docks, asphalt in the drive ways and parking lot, etc etc etc.
The only thing that will probably be custom and contractors flown in is for the low-volt and fiber networks. Everything else will have to be built to local building codes and inspected by the local authority, whom the local contractors have working relationships with.
Then there is the maintenance, like painting, remodels, etc etc.
In the middle, there are the jobs for the folks who man the datacenter.
At the end, there are restaurants, hotel staff, and local nightlife who thrive on Apple employees and consultants that would come through to maintain and upgrade the datacenter. That's thousands of hotel room/nights those businesses won't see.
Data centers mostly do run themselves. Do you guys think data centers are staffed with thousands of workers?
If that. The last data center I worked at belonged to a major telco; two huge warehouse-style buildings with a multitude of different data centers within them. The most people I saw on-site at any one time was about 20.
Please post what you describe as "data centers that look like shit". Also you do understand that most data centers are located away from town centers, right? With the space and power requirements, Apple and Google puts their data centers very specifically away from everything.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
People employed by corporations.
People own corporations.
Corporations pay taxes.
In short, Corporations are just another group of people. ;)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
So, this is literally 5 minutes down the road from me (when the traffic's good) ..
This isn't a popular decision here. I don't personally know anyone who had any objections at all - although we do note one of the people objecting resides on the other side of the country.
On the other hand, it's not the end of the world either. Once they're operational, datacenters don't employ anywhere near as many people as you'd think. Especially when they're single-tenant and managed off-site. And as small and rural as Athenry sounds (and looks), it's turning into a commuter town anyway. The city would be considered a very reasonable commute by American standards. (I have colleagues that can get in in 10-15 minutes - but sometimes take an hour to get home. Traffic is our major problem here, and this site would have little impact on it.)
Someone mentioned taxes. No-one's here is under any illusion that the topics are related. Denmark is not exactly a tax haven, and the two sites were announced at the same time. This is a stupid process that's been dragging out years longer than it should have, and ground to a halt enough times that the end was inevitable.
Someone else mentioned renewables. It's entirely wind here. We don't have a lot of scope for hydro; it's just too flat to support it. We do have a lot of scope for tidal, but little willingness to tamper with the picturesque coastlines when wind is so very plentiful here.
All in all, this is just a failure of process. Not the planning process itself, but the appeals process shouldn't be able to drag out so long as to destroy an opportunity. There should be a limit to how many appeals you can lose, otherwise the process stops being a battle of facts, and simply a battle of stubbornness.
I mean, imagine if you were trying to build a home - and someone a few hundred miles away objected to it. And objected, and objected. And lost every time, but was able to continue objecting until the build was no longer feasible. You'd be asking where the line is too. People should be able to object, and those objections should be able to hold some weight - I think it's fantastic that the common man can actually win against someone the size of Apple. But if the developer wins, that should mean something too.