- 28.6 million tonnes CO₂e - 49.35% of the entire national Commercial Built Environment carbon budget to 2030, later revised by the applicant to 1.78%
- Ecology, Heritage and Parks all recommended refusal over 2.9km of medieval-era hedgerow loss - overridden by planning conditions
- 20 Aug 2025 - Kildare County Council grants permission despite objections from An Taisce, Friends of the Earth and others
- Appealed by both sides - unusually, both the developer and objectors appealed the same grant to An Bord Pleanála
- Independent sources point to Microsoft as the undisclosed real-world customer behind Herbata's campus
- Once zoned, hard to stop - the throughline lesson for why P2 needs its zoning removed before an application exists
What was applied for
Herbata Limited applied to build six two-storey data centre buildings at Halverstown/Jigginstown/Newhall (the P1 zoning, off the R409 near the M7 interchange), each with an approximately 24,750m² data hall, gas turbines, gas engines and battery energy storage in every plant area, plus a separate 110kV grid substation (assessed separately by An Bord Pleanála). Rooftop solar and future Corporate Power Purchase Agreements were proposed to meet a 30% renewable energy target for operations; the primary energy source described was on-site gas-fired generation.
Source: An Taisce submission on app. 2460787, p.1-2, application description (local copy; original via the KCC planning register); KCC Planner's Report, p.1-3 (local copy, same original register). Kildare County Council's portal doesn't support stable per-document links, which is why we mirror the documents we cite most - see Contact if you'd like a mirrored copy removed.
Timeline
- 11 Sep 2024Application lodged. An Taisce and other bodies referred the case for review given it included a full Environmental Impact Assessment Report (EIAR).
- Sep 2024Public submissions received, including from An Taisce, Newhall Residents Group, Friends of the Irish Environment, Caragh Tidy Towns, County Kildare Chamber, and several individual residents.
- 4 Oct 2024Council issued a Further Information (FI) request following its first planner's report.
- Jun-Jul 2025Applicant's Further Information response received and re-circulated for a second round of public and agency submissions, including further objections from An Taisce, Friends of the Earth, and Friends of the Irish Environment.
- 20 Aug 2025Kildare County Council grants permission, subject to conditions and a Chief Executive's Order.
- 19 Sep 2025Appealed to An Bord Pleanála - unusually, by both the developer (first-party appeal) and third parties (objectors).
- Oct 2025 - Apr 2026Ongoing appeal correspondence between the parties and An Bord Pleanála; the Board's decision date has been pushed back at least once, most recently noted as delayed to 07/04/2026, with further correspondence into late April 2026.
Timeline compiled from the public document index for planning application 2460787 on Kildare County Council's iDocs planning register, cross-checked against the Planner's Reports and decision documents cited below.
Who objected
Objectors in the first round alone included An Taisce, Friends of the Irish Environment, Newhall Residents Group, Caragh Tidy Towns, and multiple individual residents. A second, smaller round of objections followed the Further Information response, including Friends of the Earth Ireland. The County Kildare Chamber submission, by contrast, was supportive - a reminder that this isn't a universally one-sided debate locally.
Source: KCC Planner's Report, p.19-20 (summary of submissions received), cross-checked against the public submission index for app. 2460787.
How the biggest objections got resolved - not refused
We've read the Council's own Further Information request (4 Oct 2024) and final Planner's Report (20 Aug 2025) for application 2460787. Every claim below cites the specific page. The pattern is consistent: nearly every serious objection was raised by the Council's own experts too - but each was closed out through a design tweak, a re-calculation, or a planning condition, rather than a refusal.
The carbon budget number the applicant reported fell from 49.35% to 1.78%
In October 2024, the Council's own planner objected that the development would emit 28.6 million tonnes of CO₂e over its lifetime - on the figures in the applicant's own Environmental Impact Assessment Report (EIAR), c. 49.35% of the entire national Commercial Built Environment sector's emissions ceiling to 2030 - for one single development. The report said this was "excessive," would "set an undesirable precedent," and ran contrary to national climate policy.
Source: KCC, Further Information request, 4 Oct 2024, item 1.
In its Further Information response, the applicant submitted a revised figure of 1.78%. Two separate changes fed into that drop, and - working through the applicant's own numbers as recorded in the planner's report - both did real work: (1) the applicant reassessed its methodology, moving from the EIAR's original "worst case" assumptions to a "likely" scenario, and shortened the assumed operating lifespan from 50 to 20 years, together said to cut the estimated tonnage itself by 84%; and (2) separately, the applicant argued a data centre's emissions should be compared against the national Electricity sectoral ceiling rather than the Commercial Built Environment ceiling used in the Council's original request - a different, larger budget to measure against. We have not independently verified either the revised tonnage or the choice of sector, and as far as the planning file shows, neither did Kildare County Council: the Planner's Report records the applicant's submitted figures rather than an independent recalculation.
Source: KCC Planner's Report, p.7-9 ("Applicant's Response" under Further Information item 1).
Kildare County Council's own energy consultant, Codema (Dublin's Energy Agency), reviewed the Further Information response and still concluded it "does not change the fundamental design of the proposal and it would still consume vast amounts of gas from the gas network," and separately that the proposed reliance on hydrogen for decarbonisation "is not in line with national policy as set out in the National Hydrogen Strategy." Neither finding changed the Council's recommendation to grant.
Source: KCC Planner's Report, p.59-60.
The "islanded data centre" objection was resolved by a condition, not a redesign
The original FI request flagged the development as an "islanded" data centre - one effectively powered by on-site gas rather than the national grid - which the Council said ran counter to national decarbonisation policy. The final permission does not require the gas turbines to be removed. Instead, Condition 4 requires the developer to secure a full grid connection from EirGrid covering the site's entire electrical load before construction can even start, restricting the on-site gas turbines to backup, emergency, and grid-export use. The underlying gas infrastructure - including a new high-pressure pipeline not yet built or approved - remains part of the permitted scheme.
Source: KCC, Further Information request, 4 Oct 2024, item 3; KCC Planner's Report, p.83-84 (Condition 4) and p.56 (gas pipeline not yet constructed).
Ecology, Heritage and Parks all recommended refusal - overridden by planning conditions
Internally, three of the Council's own specialist sections - Ecology, Heritage, and Parks - recommended refusal over the loss of 2.9km of hedgerow, including historic townland-boundary hedgerows dating from medieval times, against only 0.6km of replacement planting. The planner's report agreed this loss was "too significant" and "contrary to County Development Plan policy." Rather than refuse, the final decision instead imposed conditions requiring three of the six data centre buildings to be resized and relocated to avoid part of the hedgerow loss - a compromise, not the refusal originally recommended by the Council's own ecologists.
Source: KCC Planner's Report, p.20 (referral summary: Ecology, Heritage and Parks each recorded as "Recommends Refusal"), p.47-52 (hedgerow discussion), and p.85-86 (Condition 8, building relocation).
An Taisce's national objection was one line in a long referral table
An Taisce's detailed submission - the one included in our background documents - argued the whole application was incompatible with Ireland's legally binding carbon budgets. In the Council's summary of prescribed body responses, it appears as: "An Taisce: Concern re: emissions, carbon budgets, Climate Act." Every other prescribed body (Uisce Éireann, HSE, TII, HSA, Dept. of Heritage) is recorded as "no objection subject to conditions." An Taisce's objection did not stop the recommendation to grant.
Source: KCC Planner's Report, p.21 (Prescribed Bodies summary table); An Taisce submission on app. 2460787.
The upshot
Every substantive climate, energy and ecology objection raised by the Council's own experts was real and was taken seriously on paper - but the zoning meant refusal was never really on the table. The 105-page final Planner's Report states: "Having regard to the location and specific zoning of the site for Data Centre in the Naas Local Area Plan 2021-2027, it is considered that the principle of a Data Centre on the lands is acceptable" (p.43), and concludes: "Having regard to the foregoing report and assessment, it is recommended that permission be granted" (p.82). The outstanding concerns (grid connection, hedgerow loss) were judged "capable of being addressed by condition" (p.82).
Source: KCC Planner's Report, p.43 and p.82; Chief Executive Statement, p.105, signed by Deputy Chief Executive Annette Aspell, recommending the grant.
Who's actually behind P1 - and what it suggests for P2
Herbata Limited, the applicant of record, is owned by Robert Moffett, an engineer and entrepreneur who previously founded the forklift manufacturer Combilift; its chief executive is Gerry Prendergast. Neither Herbata's planning application nor its public statements name a tenant - the application describes a "next generation data centre campus" in its own right.
Several independent sources, taken together, point to the same real-world customer behind this specific campus. Microsoft ran its own public consultation for a data centre "in Jigginstown, near Naas" from November 2023, publishing a site map that sits in exactly the same location as the P1 lands, off the R409 near the M7 interchange, and describing a masterplan of data centre buildings, a security fence, a new access road and a substation - all matching what Herbata later applied for. The Irish Times reported in August 2024, days before Herbata lodged its application, that "tech giant Microsoft has already confirmed that it is drawing up its own plans for a data centre project for the Jigginstown area," with a company spokeswoman describing it as still in "early stages." Industry trackers Baxtel and DataCenterHawk both catalogue the completed project under the name "Microsoft: Herbata Campus Data Center."
Sources: Data Center Dynamics, 28 Aug 2025 (Herbata ownership, CEO, capacity); Microsoft's own site consultation materials, Nov 2023 - Jul 2024 (local copy of presentation; Microsoft's project update blog); The Irish Times, 1 Aug 2024; Baxtel and DataCenterHawk industry listings.
We want to be careful about what this does and doesn't establish. No document we've found has either company stating outright "Microsoft is Herbata's tenant" - what we have is a developer-and-anchor-tenant pattern common in Irish hyperscale real estate, inferred from a site map, a timeline, and how industry trackers label the finished project, not a signed lease. We think it's solid enough to report, but it's still an inference from converging sources rather than a single confirmed fact.
What it's useful for is calibrating expectations for P2. We've found no evidence of any application, consultation, or named tenant for the P2 site - see P2 & The Ask for current status. But P1's history shows that this stretch of Naas is already attracting genuinely large-scale hyperscale investment, not speculative or marginal development. P2's zoned area is 54.55 hectares, about 41% larger than P1's 38.69 hectares - so if a similar development pattern were followed there, the site's size alone means a future P2 scheme could plausibly be bigger than P1's six-building, 180MW campus, not smaller. We'd treat any assumption that a P2 application will be a lesser or scaled-down version of P1 as unfounded.
Why this matters for P2
The strength and range of objections to P1 did not stop it being granted - because the zoning had already answered the only question that mattered before a single objection was even read: whether a data centre belongs on this land at all. Once planning permission is sought under the current zoning, our reading of the evidence on this page is that it becomes very hard to stop - a well-resourced applicant, detailed objections from An Taisce and others, and internal Council recommendations for refusal on ecology and heritage grounds still ended in a grant, resolved through conditions rather than a "no." We think "almost impossible to stop" is a fair, evidenced summary of what P1 shows, not an exaggeration. That's the uncomfortable lesson: fighting a single application, however well-argued, is an uphill battle once a site is already zoned exclusively for data centre use and a developer has filed. It's exactly why our energy for P2 is going into removing the zoning before an application exists, rather than waiting to refight the same losing battle over conditions and mitigation.
Read the P2 ask →