UK government advises deleting emails to save water
gov.uk
gov.uk
Also the UK government:
> Taken together, the 50 measures will make the UK irresistible to AI firms looking to start, scale, or grow their business. It builds on recent progress in AI that saw £25 billion of new investment in data centres announced since the government took office last July.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-sets-out-b...
He was also satirizing some of the most absurd parts of British political culture too. Doublethink wasn’t just part of Soviet political culture. It was part of British political culture and clearly still is based on what you just posted.
Is this holding two ideas in your head at the same time, or holding contradictory ideas in your head at the same time?
The distasteful part of all this is that this is the government transparently deflecting responsibility for their incompetence. Instead of addressing their chronic mismanagement of the water supply they've decided the better course of action is to sell the narrative that this will all go away if you delete your vacation photos.
I’m pretty sure the true irony is the government—an entity ostensibly at the service of its citizens—asking said denizens to perform low-impact actions detrimental to themselves so that massive faceless corporations can continue to exploit them with impunity while reaping massive profits and laughing all the way to the bank.
And even if it does complete, you'll often never know. Upon command, Gmail tells you "I'll do it later". And often never alerts of completion.
Let's ignore that most emails will be in semi-cold storage. Let's ignore that energy usage per email would be absolutely minimum. Did they not consider that thousands of people hitting the email servers requesting to view and then subsequently delete emails, wouldn't be an issue?
What I (tongue-in-cheek) suspect is that GCHQ and the like are having difficulty in searching so many emails. Maybe by reviewing the email it triggers a filter policy which aids in searching them. After all, the Online Safety Act mostly seems to be targetting data in transit.
One question I had is what would replacing fresh water with saltwater be viable? We have endless amounts of saltwater that would solve the wasting fresh water issue. I'm assuming some sort of closed system where evaporation isn't an issue to leave deposits. Saltwater would also have a lower freezing temp, so you could chill the water cooler than fresh as well.
(I don't remember how this relates to the original argument)
Edit: oh if you meant "data center" by "municipal" then I guess! I thought you meant city drinking water
But I would hope datacentres could use recycled or desalinated water for cooling rather than using drinking water.
If that's not how they are using the water, then what are they using it for? Swamp coolers?
Air cooled chillers are fine for a commercial office building or tip-up warehouse, but data centers need to remove an enormous amount of heat.
No... Proposed solutions should be practical from every angle, not just that single angle.
Also commercial water rates appear to be about £2.50 / cubic meter.
Desalination depends on electricity prices, which are fairly high in the UK at the moment.
I even became interested in how much energy is needed to desalinate water by boiling it, taking into account recuperation and everything else.
> Desalination depends on electricity prices, which are fairly high in the UK at the moment.
Electricity prices are largely dependent on the need to deliver a steady flow of energy and store it, which are not a concern in the context of desalination water.
This is the mid Atlantic where the wet bulb and dry bulb temperature are always very close so the water would be useless for cooling. And of course there are few things that add less traffic than empty buildings full of computers.
Also a lot of the non-AI stuff is still air cooled. In fact I know people at a couple large public tech companies spinning up AI hardware and even for that they're going with air cooling because it's all their OPs people are familiar with.
I wish people were more precise with communicating the actual problem.
1. A closed system cannot exhaust heat via evaporative cooling, which would defeat the purpose.
2. Many datacenters are no where near salt water.
3. There are likely reliability issues that would need to be overcome and it is simply cheaper to use fresh water.
If only we had a way of moving water around from places where it was plentiful to places that are not. Seriously though, this is a limitation? Vegas is no where near water, and that didn't stop it from being.
Las Vegas is very close to water. 90% of their water from the Hoover Dam, which is only 30 miles away. They don't pipe it in. Of course, this has created a severe risk of water shortages due to falling water levels on the Colorado River.
Encouraging people to log on and delete old pics and emails is only going to create more heat as servers have to spin up access to stuff.
The real culprit of data-center heat usage is surely AI
It's one thing if they want to raise awareness of how much water is being used by data centers, but it crosses into absurdity with suggestions like "delete your data from the cloud".
In practice the random storage and delayed deletion makes this an absurdly asynchronous event.
In reality the UK just doesn't have that many consumer data centres, they mostly serve business. There's not likely even that much AI compute in the UK (yet).
The actual reason (as said elsewhere is water storage planning).
Exactly what those processes might be is left as an exercise for the reader.
I have only ever toured a data center once, but the one I toured had no water usage by the cooling infrastructure as far as I could tell. However, the facility’s APUE was something like 1.7, which is high. I have read that some facilities with impressively low APUE numbers use water during particularly hot summer days, which is presumably for evaporative cooling. Unfortunately, I have yet to see one of these facilities in person to know the details beyond what has been publicly written.
If it counts for anything, I have hundreds of commits in OpenZFS. I know some things about data centers from a mix of professional contacts since my work is used in them (which is how I got the tour in the first place), and personal interest in the subject, but I am far from an expert on all aspects of how data centers work. Speaking of which, I doubt there is any one person who is an expert on all aspects of how data centers work, since the knowledge is spread across multiple types of experts. A physicist would not be my first choice of expert when asking questions about data centers. A data center technician would be a better person to ask.
Even the 'take shorter showers' advice is interesting, they could advise people to skip a few and flush the toilet only after having a 'number two'.
Recently I had the water board out to investigate a leak. Earlier in the year, before there was any hint of drought, I had been pressure washing the green mould off my late father's house, leading to a lot of water usage. And yes, I did use a lot of water then, far more than could be saved by skipping showers, using the dishwasher instead of hand washing crockery and by only boiling the water I needed for tea, nevermind deleting emails.
There will always be some that consume water at an entirely different scale to others, there needs to be a pricing mechanism for this beyond the metering they have now, where everyone gets an allowance for their basic needs and those watering gardens, washing cars or power-spraying houses pay considerably more. There will be
"Oi oi, stop right there, in the name of His Majesty the King. 'ave you a deleting loicence?"
> I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me
https://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html#internetuse
A study on this would be pretty interesting.
This is a national disgrace and I am ashamed.
HOW TO SAVE WATER AT HOME
Install a rain butt to collect rainwater to use in the garden.
Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day.
Use water from the kitchen to water your plants.
Avoid watering your lawn – brown grass will grow back healthy.
Turn off the taps when brushing teeth or shaving.
Take shorter showers.
Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.
(I do not understand the down-votes, it is a great way to hear other people's opinion(s). Is that so bad?)
This assumes water is inconsistent. Once the rain butt is full, there's no more benefit. And then in a long dry season once it's emptied, it's not saving any more.
> Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day.
If you're on a water meter you're already incentivised to fix this - so a better answer is water meters.
> Use water from the kitchen to water your plants.
Assuming you're using waste water, which most people won't.
> Avoid watering your lawn – brown grass will grow back healthy.
Households with lawns are rarer than they used to be - a big red flag has always been that hosepipe bans never applies to golf courses which use a large amount of water to keep their grass green all year.
> Turn off the taps when brushing teeth or shaving.
A few minutes of water p/person per day.
> Take shorter showers.
Probably minimal and potentially a hygiene problem.
> Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.
Negligible at best.
My household (in the US) uses water from cooking rice to water plants, but I cannot imagine many UK households cook rice to be able to do that.
If you're irrigating your garden, that's also going to be a big one, but quite often you get a hosepipe ban in the dry season anyway.
Someone with a water meter should try these measures and see if they notice a difference; I bet they don't. The data center one is of course unmeasureable by the individual.
Tennis courts: during one of the last droughts the local tennis club kept watering their courts -- sand. The upper class twits give a F* about preserving water. Why should anybody let their plants die for those f*ers who waste it big times?
I would have speculated that they are imagining savings opportunities that do not exist, but the “delete emails” advice gives clear evidence that they are imagining savings opportunities that do not exist, so there is no need for speculation.
I suspect this one dwarfs the others. It's why some water companies have campaigned to ban new dual flush toilets in the UK (there's a common failure mode for dual flush toilets which results in the tap to the cistern not properly switching off once it's full).
Deleting emails to save water usage is not the answer
The world's just going to get thirsty.
Neither the public, nor the politicians, nor the newspapers to whom they are accountable, understand engineering.
> If there is some issue with public water supplies, how can the government build infrastructure to mitigate those issues?
The "public" water supplies have been privatized, and the government doesn't want to spend any money.
The privatization may eventually solve itself with the bankruptcy of Thames water, but the problem of money remains.
> "Water companies must continue to quickly fix leaks and lead the way in saving water. We know the challenges farmers are facing and will continue to work with them, other land users, and businesses to ensure everyone acts sustainably.
> We are grateful to the public for following the restrictions, where in place, to conserve water in these dry conditions. Simple, everyday choices – such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails – also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife."
Watch how the bait and switch operates. The privatized water companies are (a) bankrupt and (b) leaking hundreds of millions of liters of water (figures quoted in the 500m - 600m region for Thames Water). However, this is politically difficult to fix because it requires the government to do something and maybe even spend some money. So they put out a statement which implies that ordinary people could do something to help, even if it's literally a drop in the bucket.
see https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/land-use-biodiversity...
Its insanity.
Give powers to idiots and they will come up with stuff like this.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisor...
Successive governments (both sides) have been shown to be totally spineless with water regulation, despite significant public outrage. Privatisation has been a huge failure and yet we appear to be stuck in this position.
The only way you could make this viable would be to change silicon processes to those capable of running at significantly over 100C. This incurs a big efficiency penalty, but then you can start boiling water directly off the die and letting the steam move itself, perhaps to some sort of Stirling engine condenser cycle, with a lot less pumping losses.
If you're going to be doing cogeneration on-site, it can be worth considering a Combined Heating, Cooling, and Power system - but the benefits tend to be fairly marginal.
In the future, there's a possibility of extending the "lights out datacentre" concept, and going fully automated. If you don't need to accommodate humans, you can run much higher temperature gradients.
With a gradient of around 200 K, for instance, you might expect to recover somewhere between 30-35% of your total energy input.
The UK actually ought to be a good choice for an experiment along those lines, given its long history with gas-cooled nuclear systems - sadly, the engineers involved have mostly all retired by now...
Fundamentally, a limit on doing it at scale is that it for efficiency it requires the heat to be consumed near the production - and the bulk of large power intense data centres are not located in the midst of high density residential neighbourhoods with a demand for heat.
So turn the tap off while brushing your teeth and delete your old emails, and all will be fine.
Most of the issue though is the water companies funnelling revenue to shareholders and not maintaining the network, so they lose an awful lot of water through leaking pipes.
The privatisation of critical utilities and infrastructure was such a stupid move.
That said, the recommendation is nonsense, emails and photos make up a tiny fraction of the cooling requirements for data centres.
Overall this is "just" a question of infrastructure, which means long term investments that have dried up (pun intended!) decades ago.
If these activities were not capped, the companies are naturally incentivised to build more to boost their regulated asset value, which means they can make more money.
a) only part of the solution (water reuse schemes can be much cheaper and more effective) b) really difficult to build! Finding an appropriate location (google the Tryweryn reservoir in Wales for an example of the consequences of building one in a problematic location), planning constraints, environmental impact and subsequent pushback from locals and environment groups etc etc.
I don't disagree the UK needs more of reservoirs but they ain't trivial things to build. A good overview in this news article here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2k147dkgx8o
More reservoirs are unavoidable. There is no alternative, "reuse" schemes are gimmicks.
I'll quote another colleague there "If you survive public sector for 6 months you'll be unfit even for Soylent Green". I didn't last 3.
> The remaining areas are normal: Hertfordshire, London, Kent, Devon and Cornwall.
So maybe the advice should be to migrate your workloads from regional data centers into London data centers.
By your definition nothing uses water as long as hydrolysis isn't involved?
Water usage matters in water-stressed regions. In other regions, conserving other resources will matter more.
If you take the stance that data centers are bad because they use water, and thus your usage of data centers should be reduced, then you are likely to be optimizing the wrong thing in many cases.
Simplistic advice to delete emails to save water may well cause less efficient usage of resources whose conservation matters more.
What would probably increase heat and the need for cooling more meaningfully is actual data transfer and processing (i.e, reading and sending emails). But even so, compared to all the other internet activities (streaming video, gaming, AWS/Azure/GCP).. it's probably a drop in the bucket.
Liberals: "The capitalists are going to build data centers. It's inevitable. Progress and all that. It's up to us to mitigate the drought by showering less and deleting the emails!"
I was going to include the far-left position, but hey, they don't have a chance in hell of breaking through the capitalist two-party system. The prognosis is not good.