The Irish government’s policies towards data centers has caused the country to miss out on investment, the head of an industry group believes.

Maurice Mortell, the chairman of Digital Infrastructure Ireland (DII), critiqued the state of the country’s electrical infrastructure in an interview Irish radio station Newstalk this week.

He said the data center moratorium that has been placed on Irish capital Dublin, and the inaction of the country’s energy and water utility regulator, the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU), have hampered progress, pointing out that the CRU has yet to finalize its approach data center grid connections.

“So for the last four years, the industry has been more or less in limbo,” Mortell said.

Since January 2022, EirGrid, the country’s state-owned electric power transmission operator, has imposed a de facto moratorium on data center applications in the greater Dublin area, forcing operators to look at alternative options or to bring their own generation.

The CRU published a proposed decision on electricity grid connection policy for data centers earlier this year, in February. Potential policies included requirements about data centers providing generation and/or storage capacity to match their own demand, reporting relating to their use of renewable energy and emissions, and mandatory market sounding exercises for Systems Operators like EirGrid.

The consultation for this proposed decision closed in April, and a final decision is expected within the year. At the time, DII had also submitted a public response to the CRU’s policy direction.

Mortell charged that the CRU’s “lack of decision making, lack of clarity around what’s happening with our energy, what’s happening with the investment in the grid” had led to a “position where there’s almost complete inertia.”

The chairman also touched on the state of Ireland’s planning system, stating that the country was “crippled by indecision.”

“I think every single renewable energy project has to go through some form of parole or some appeals process, some judicial review,” he said. “So for any renewable energy project you can add on four or five years to the project timeline before it gets brought to fruition.”

Regarding investment, the chairman added that the digital infrastructure industry had put about €18 billion ($20.9bn) in Ireland since 2010, with “€5.8bn ($6.7bn) of that now in stranded projects.

“These are projects that have started, have planning permission, have bought land, but don’t have a connection to the grid. In some cases, they have bought land, they’ve got the sites cleared,” Mortell said.

“We have another €7.8bn ($8.8bn) of projects in the pipeline, which may or may not get completed. And these ones aren’t AI. [These are] just projects that were planned to be delivered in Ireland.”

It is unclear whether these statistics are drawn from DII’s own research or an external report, but it is worth mentioning that other figures in the industry have cited similar figures: in May of this year, the director of planning consultancy Mitchell McDermott Anthony McDermott stated that around €6.5bn ($7.5bn) worth of projects were stranded.

A source for this figure was also not provided.

Mortell added that Ireland had been “bypassed,” referring to the US-UK tech deals struck in September. “[Our] foreign direct investment image has definitely been tarnished,” he claimed.

Ireland has been attempting to upgrade its electrical infrastructure ever since it became a data center hotspot. In July, the government approved a €3.5bn ($4bn) investment in the country’s grid infrastructure, allocating €1.5bn ($1.7bn) to ESB Networks and €2bn ($2.3bn) to EirGrid.

That same month, the government adopted a strategy statement on private wire that would permit private operators to build and operate its own electrical infrastructure. Official legislation on the matter has yet to be introduced.

Mortell did say that the private wire policy is quite positive, but noted that the €3.5bn investment would probably take “five, ten years… to run through, to deliver new capacity.”

Ireland’s energy woes have been particularly acute. The percentage of Ireland’s metered energy consumed by data centers currently hovers at around 20 percent, according to a report released by the country’s Central Statistics Office in June of this year.

Backlash against data centers has also been fierce. In July, Ireland’s National Trust appealed against planning permission granted to a data center in County Louth, and in May, bestselling author Sally Rooney and others contested Mayo County Council’s decision to grant permission to Avaio for a new data center.