UK government advises deleting emails to save water
gov.uk> Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.
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...
I'm surprised anyone wants to put a data center in the UK given our top of the range electricity costs.
When George Orwell wrote 1984 it wasn’t just the Soviet Union he was criticizing.
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.
There's a reason 1984, V for Vendetta and all such stories come from the UK.
Soviet doublethink?
Is this holding two ideas in your head at the same time, or holding contradictory ideas in your head at the same time?
I heard Russel Brand once say something like the mark of an intelligent man is the ability to hold two conflicting ideas. And then I remembered his first TV job as Big Brother's Big Mouth!
That’s a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald.
However, holding two conflicting ideas and not even realising the contradictions is a mark of a brainwashed individual.
I imagine he was probably still pretty salty about the whole Gollancz/Homage to Catalonia thing.
Nevermind water, there were (still are?) restrictions on new builds in the West London area because the grid could not cope due to the ever increasing number of data centres popping up in old trading estates.
The irony is that deletion is one of the most expensive operations in data infrastructure at a pretty fundamental level. It is likely going to consume far more power upon deletion than it would if you just left the data alone. Ignoring that deleting emails would have no consequential impact on water consumption, technically the advice is likely to make the situation worse.
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.
To be fair, it's not so much this government that should be blamed for chronic mismanagement - they inherited the situation. I would like to blame Thatcher for privatisation of essential monopolies and also the water company management for essentially diverting as much money as possible from their customers into their own pockets - Thames Water being the prime example of huge debts being created and money not being spent on upgrading infrastructure.
> The irony is that deletion is one of the most expensive operations in data infrastructure
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.
taking a page out of the plastics lobby book then.
I used to work on the system at Google which processed deleted emails to ensure they are deleted across all systems it might have touched (eg, delete any calendar events created by the email, rebuild indexes, delete backup restore keys etc). Deleting an email was remarkably significantly more resource intensive compared to just leaving it alone, so this advice could only make the situation worse.
Do you happen to know why deleting lots of emails at once doesn't really work? Gmail that is. Select all 100k or so, delete, gets rid of the first N but not the rest, and N is order of some hundreds. It means delete old emails is far more time intensive than it should be.
Try just leaving the tab sitting open for an hour. I have a suspicion the frontend works iteratively on them in the background, and the UI only updates occasionally. I haven't tried it with deletions, but with "mark as read" on a triage inbox this has worked with 40k+ emails.
That system was what fed into the one I touched, which was an offline batch pipeline, so I wasn't tooinvolved with the Gmail internals that you're talking about. I know about 10 years ago many Googlers had the same sort of problems as you describe, I assume it's a tiny bit better these days, most of the backend has been replaced over that time. Expensive operations are often slow to ensure there is reasonable isolation between users, so you don't hurt someone elses experience when you do these things. They aren't frequent operations/CUJs so they aren't optimized either.
It would require a queueing and progress tracking infrastructure once a request gets too large to process in the span of a few seconds, which is a lot of stuff to build for a very rare operation.
Possibly worse for many users is that labelling has the same flaw.
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.
> Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.
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.
That's pretty funny. It shows the slight gap in understanding about what "data centres" do, mixed with the classic advice to "don't print this email" to save power/trees.
"No trees were harmed by this email, although, some electrons were slightly bothered" or some such was something I remember seeing in response
Also "this email consists of 100% recycled electrons".
The electrons in the AC power lines just had to dance slightly differently, but the ones in the transistors had to take one for the team and get dumped to ground.
I just heard this while driving, and I couldn't stop laughing at how confident the lady was in this being a solution. The storage pools will not suddenly no longer be needed because people stop syncing their devices to the cloud. It will just be used by something else.
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'm kind of suspicious of the water for datacenter stats, because I'm skeptical of the extent to which evaporation-based cooling is used rather than just air-to-air cooling. Wouldn't this result in visible plumes of condensation, as it does with power station cooling towers?
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.
My parent's hometown blocked data center construction because of concerns about traffic and water consumption.
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.
> Also commercial water rates appear to be about £2.50 / cubic meter.
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.
Engineers are pretty clever, but salt water is some nasty stuff.
Desalination is cheap though. It's just never really been needed at scale in the UK because of rainfall. Maybe it's time to reassess
Desalination is energy expensive, and results in a pretty nasty waste. Removing the salt loses the benefit of lower temperatures.
Desalination is expensive
I’ve always thought desalination would make a nice shiftable load to incentivize renewable build-out.
Ok, its maybe more expensive than I realised according to that source, but I would argue that comparing it to something like charging EVs or running a fridge is not a fair comparison. If you desalinate 1000 litres of water it's not the same as a household using 1000 litres of water. Not exactly. Once water is in a municipal system it's cleaned and reused many many times. Desalination could overcome water shortages by topping up water in a system, in times of drought, rather than just waiting for rain.
Hm, the only reuse of municipal water I know is using treated sewer water for watering plants. I don't think any US cities recycle water back into a potable water system -- have you heard of that happening anywhere?
(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
Ok I had heard of it happening in the UK but now I can't find any evidence of such, apart from a just approved scheme to treat wastewater and pump it into the Thames upstream, which is then used to source drinking water in London. So in a way, its going to happen in London, even if it hadn't already been, as I had believed.
But I would hope datacentres could use recycled or desalinated water for cooling rather than using drinking water.
I see a few obvious problems:
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.
> 2. Many datacenters are no where near salt 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.
> Vegas is no where near water...
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.
Using chilled brine as a cooling medium is common in industrial processes, unfortunately it needs to be chilled and that usually comes via an evaporative cooling tower. Assuming the sea is close and the temperature low enough, an open loop pulling from and discharging to the sea isn't than big of an engineering challenge.
Closed loop water cooling probably doesn't make a lot of sense at scale; radiators aren't very efficient at the relatively cool temperatures this sort of system would be operating at. Maybe if the water loop was cooled by refrigeration systems? That would be expensive though.
Closed loop water systems is a common form of cooling in large/commercial buildings. Typically, a large chiller unit on the roof with the cold water piped throughout the building connected to individual blowers. I've been told it is much more cost efficient.
If that's not how they are using the water, then what are they using it for? Swamp coolers?
Adding an evaporative cooling tower to a chilled water loop can up the COP to 7ish, an air-cooled chiller by itself maxes out around 4. It’s almost twice as effective at removing heat.
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.
A closed loop water system by definition doesn't "use up" water! It only matters for this discussion if there's a continuous supply of new fresh water going in.
> It only matters for this discussion if there's a continuous supply of new fresh water going in.
No... Proposed solutions should be practical from every angle, not just that single angle.
oh, where was this on? Was it the MP on the press release? I'll see if I can get it off iplayer or something, I wanna hear this
I want a breakdown of how much energy would be saved by deleting old emails vs energy spent by people using VPNs now because of the Online Safety Act :)
Ok I'm not a physicist but surely long term storage of pictures and emails does not actively generate heat in a data-center?
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
Storage on spinning disks does. Storage on ssds does as well but should be much less. Cold backups don't. Now, the idea that people can just delete their cat pictures to meaningful impact cooling in the dcs is just garbage, particularly now when most of the energy used in the dcs goes to gpus
My understanding is that SSDs are in the sub-watt territory when idle. So ironically the act of deleting the email instead of keeping the drive in steady-state will likely use significantly more power.
Consumer SSDs idle at very low power, but SSDs intended for data centers generally idle at several watts.
How often do you think a device is idle in a data center? My guess is not very often if ever.
Often, in a system with a large number of drives where actively-used data and cold data are automatically migrated to active and mostly-idle drives respectively.
If the drives are spinning, they generate heat. The drives spin regardless if they are empty or full. In an array setup in large storage pools, there's no spinning down the drives either. Sadly, there's no countering these suggestions to those making them, as they clearly have no understanding of what they are talking about. They're just trying to make their 15 minutes.
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".
Some of the responses here are assuming that your old emails are sat there, quiescent. A better model might be that they are part of a dataset that is actively scanned, repeatedly, so deleting them makes those scanning processes more efficient.
Exactly what those processes might be is left as an exercise for the reader.
In theory if you delete enough you can power off a server.
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).
The only thing I can think of is that emails accumulate that that means more storage must be added at the data centres, requiring more electricity use. This seems trivial compared to AI power demands to me.
Storing pictures and emails in a data center does generate heat, but it is negligible. Also, claims of data center water usage are heavily overstated. Some do, but only during summer months. I assume the reason for the UK’s asinine advice is because of they think there is a link between heat generation and water usage at data centers. While a link does exist, it is not straight forward.
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.
Something is always more than nothing
Knowing the UK government it wouldn't surprise me if we start getting regular emails or text messages reminding us to regularly delete our old emails and text messages to save water
They would do better to advise people to boil only the amount of water they need for their tea for the amount of difference it makes.
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
Only boiling the water you need for tea saves energy and time but won't save water unless you were throwing away unused hot water.
Public advisory: Domestic water consumption is about 2% of the total. 98% is farming and industry. A 50% reduction in domestic water use would equate to a -1% change, which could also be accomplished with only a ~1.10% reduction by industry.
Given that emails could contain adult material, and that you need to register yourself to view adult materials in the UK, what is one to do if they want to delete emails in their web-based email service of choice but hasn't registered?
"Oi oi, stop right there, in the name of His Majesty the King. 'ave you a deleting loicence?"
Email has a specific carve out on the online safety act
So you just get adult materials in your inbox like grandad did, except this time, the inbox is digital and easier to hide from the missus.
HTTPS-over-SMTP soon?
Richard Stallman is pretty much already doing this!
> 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
Browsing the web Stallman style.
Deleting emails and old pictures is hard work and requires putting the kettle on, they should know this. This is very silly.
A study on this would be pretty interesting.
This is a national disgrace and I am ashamed.
Please, nobody comment here, we are wasting water.
Sorry I upvoted before I thought about the consequences. Please don't read this.
History will look back on Apple forcing a U2 Album download as the equivalent environmental disaster as the BP oil spill.
From the website:
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?)
> Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day.
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).
Ironically, dual flush toilets are supposed to be a water saving measure.
Have you ever actually pressed the smaller flush button?
Yes? Are they seriously people who don't know how to operate a toilet?
I would not be surprised if there are.
> Install a rain butt to collect rainwater to use in the garden.
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.
I agree. Apparently the UK average daily water usage is ~140l, so "fix leaks" dwarfs all the others.
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.
Gardens? Gardens that often cool their environments?
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?
Well, yes. Also golf courses. You've hit the nail on the head that conservation hairshirt measures need some solidarity, or visibly even handed enforcement, otherwise they're just insulting.
> Assuming you're using waste water, which most people won't.
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.
How? When I use water to cook rice, the rice absorbs that water. That's kind of how you know it's done. How much water are you using when cooking rice that there's some left over to use in the plants?
The "standard" method used by East Asians is to wash the rice several times until water is clear before cooking. This waste water is said to be good to water plants with and accounts for most of the water needed.
Interesting. I was unaware of that being a thing. Is there any point/benefit to that?
Rinsing the starch off the rice results in the cooked rice having a significantly different texture. It's how you get fluffy and not very sticky rice, which is typically what you want for east asian dishes. Some rice dishes specifically need you to not rinse the rice.
Rinse rice a couple of times and the water goes from cloudy to clear. One might imagine that the rice clumps together less and has a "cleaner" mouth-feel.
Adam Ragusea has a good video on this topic: https://youtu.be/B3CHsbNkr3c
Rather than the absorption method, the rice can be cooked in a larger volume of water and then poured through a sieve once it's cooked.
Not effective at all. In most countries, residential water use is literally a drop in the bucket compared to agricultural and industrial use. Sure consumers should all do our part and not wantonly waste water, but ultimately the only way to save a significant amount of water will be to raise the prices paid by large customers.
There is one thing that will get people to save water and that is raise the price.
With the exception of the asinine piece of advice at the end, given that such advice likely has around for decades, I cannot imagine it being very effective anymore as the measures suggested should already be in effect.
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.
This is all just so exhausting. Why can't we ask why we just treat this as an engineering issue. If there is some issue with public water supplies, how can the government build infrastructure to mitigate those issues? You see the same thing with energy generation, as though energy is some God given finite resource that we have to cherish and allocate carefully. Rather they should treat it like any other good, allow prices to encourage additional supply and build around actual needs rather than judging whats a valid use of the resource
> Why can't we ask why we just treat this as an engineering issue.
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.
It is a bit of an engineering issue of the financial kind. The Thatcher govt in its wisdom privatised the water companies and then the finance wizards figured they could borrow lots of money as utilities and then instead of wasting it on water engineering they could pay it to out to shareholders and bump the stock price. And here we are.
I'm not an expert but it sounds like fresh water reserves across the planet are shrinking. It is a finite resource [0].
Can't you invest in technologies like desalination? For instance, over 3/4 of Israel’s drinking water comes from desalination plants, mostly from the Mediterranean Sea.
Deleting emails to save water usage is not the answer
Huge amounts of energy are required and it creates a lot of pollution as I understand.
The world's just going to get thirsty.
In the UK a lot of the stuff falls as rain. You just need reservoirs for when there's a bit of gap during the British summer which runs from July to August roughly.
I believe the problem is the pipes are centuries old and leak lots but replacing pipes is a nuisance. Lots of hills here so reservoirs aren't too hard to find.
It would be an interesting idea, to try to use the market to regulate energy use. As long as we correctly price in the cost of environmental cleanup related to the various technologies, it might be worth a shot.
This is why I compose my emails in smaller fonts, to protect the environment.
This is "plastic straws" bullshit. From the statement, quoted from "The Environment Agency’s Director of Water and NDG chair, Helen Wakeham"
> "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...
This is what "ESG" is in practice.
Its insanity.
Give powers to idiots and they will come up with stuff like this.
Sounds like someone got to stuff in their pet peave ham sandwich in that press release.
Another hidden cost of mass immigration (UK additional ~5m net immigration over the last 10 years[0]) is services such as water and energy suffer badly. Food scales quite well, as it's a dynamic, fine-grained system, but water and energy supply need capital investment to trigger a higher tier of supply.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisor...
The problem isn’t home usage, or data centers. It’s the total lack of investment since the water companies were privatised and moved to a model of money extraction for shareholders. Now we have no new capacity in years and more leaks (waste and clean) than ever, and yet it’s always the public who need to save a little more or pay increased bills.
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.
Could there possibly be an ulterior motive? What other purposes might be served by encouraging many people to delete old emails?
Serious question. Is there any technology to capture the excess thermal energy from data centers and run some of it back into the grid? Or drive some kind of desalination process? Or do anything else useful with this “surplus” heat energy?
Helsinki has many DCs connected to the district heating network, but it isn't realistic in places that don't have an existing network as creating one in the first place is a huge political/nimby issue. Amsterdam has been trying and failing for years.
Vancouver has a plant that harvests heat from sewage to provide district heating and hot water (https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/how-the-utili...) - you don't need super high temperatures for it to be useful. During construction there was talk that the Telus building downtown's in house data centre providing heat to the attached condo building (https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/servers/telus-warms-cond...) - I'm unsure if that actually went ahead.
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.
It's low-grade heat, so isn't worth much.
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...
Yes, direct immersion cooling coupled with an organic rankine cycle could do this. But you won't recover much electricity because of the relatively low temperature of the heat source- 60 to 70 deg c dielectric fluid.
Not really, because you're pumping it against the thermal gradient to start with. Low temperature difference heat is one of the more worthless things in the universe.
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.
Not a single mention of the lack of reservoir capacity, with the last major reservoir built in 1992. Population has grown by 12 million / 21% since.
So turn the tap off while brushing your teeth and delete your old emails, and all will be fine.
Nine new reservoirs are planned by 2050 apparently. But as general point reservoirs are...
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
Yes reservoirs "planned"... after 35 years of inaction.
More reservoirs are unavoidable. There is no alternative, "reuse" schemes are gimmicks.
seriously wtf ... it rains all the time there :)
Not anywhere near as much as the stereotypes/memes/etc would have you believe.
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.
Currently, because of the warming climate, the UK is actually getting more and more rain. But the problem is that rainfall is also getting more irregular, so it rains a lot then not at all for longer than before.
Overall this is "just" a question of infrastructure, which means long term investments that have dried up (pun intended!) decades ago.
The regulators determine how much the utilities can spend on maintenance and construction activities, not the companies.
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.
It is frequently damp, but that doesn't necessarily come with meaningful rainfall.
Rainfall in the UK isn't evenly distributed. The North and West gets much more rain, partly because they are closer to the Atlantic, and also because central hills (e.g. the Pennines) create rain shadows to their east. We also don't have any sort of national grid to move water from wet to drier areas.
Well at least now we know what's in the series of tubes!
You can't delete emails. They are retained by the provider that sent, the provider that received, and the government which got them from both and intercepted in the middle just to be sure.
Archive link in case the original page is updated: https://archive.is/sAOtC
No need to keep it, GCHQ have a copy if you ever need it.
Having sat in a policy meeting many years ago, as the resident "numbers guy", where they come up with that short of shit, this is clearly the usual design by committee advisory note. Some postgrad intern, getting mugged off by working there for nothing said it, someone more senior needed some padding and it sounded about right and no one in the room even understands everything that has been said. This will all be done behind closed doors with an expensive sandwich provision with at least 2-3 £1000 a day contractors in there.
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.
I only read my emails with a paper straw. That should help, right? warily eyes the 400 foot tall nuclear-powered mobile AI datacenter
Should Cola production be restricted also?
Yes, but for many other reasons.
Data centers don't really "use" water; it gets released back into the environment one way or another. What matters is whether the data center is in a water-stressed region. According to the article:
> 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.
Are you suggest they move them outside the environment? Sounds familiar.
Unfortunately this won't help as datacenters are part of the backend, not the front.
> Data centers don't really "use" water; it gets released back into the environment one way or another.
By your definition nothing uses water as long as hydrolysis isn't involved?
Yes, water is a renewable resource, and like other renewable resources the thing we should be concerned about is not the fact that it’s used at all, but how and where it is used.
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.
Cleaning takes clean water and turns it into dirty water. Cooling takes clean water and heats it. The amount of clean water stays the same.
The UK government is a punchline.
They're the entire circus.
or a joke delivered by an imbecile that totally messes up the punchline
Someone explain to me why this matters please. The emails (passively) stored on HDD/SSDs in a data centre wouldn't be the main contributor to heat generation and the needs for cooling.
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.
As an unashamed digital hoarder I never expected the UK to declare war.
Uk gov is tech illiterate
Ai use in government is on trend
Maybe just shutdown AI instead.
Just Nuke UK at this point.
just drink brawndo, the thirst mutilator
Conservatives: "Build all the data centers you want! The rate payers will he happy to pick up the cost. What's that, water? You should have thought of that before you became the unwashed masses!"
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.
Great to see the grown ups are back in charge.