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UK government advises deleting emails to save water

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Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#101

Post by ryao »

dylan604 wrote: post #31

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 fre…

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.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#102

Post by pjc50 »

GuestFAUniverse wrote: post #88
pjc50 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#103

Post by bee_rider »

arkensaw wrote: post #54
bee_rider wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’ve always thought desalination would make a nice shiftable load to incentivize renewable build-out.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#105

Post by crinkly »

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.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#106

Post by nradov »

johnisgood wrote: post #14

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 amo…

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.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#107

Post by quickthrowman »

dylan604 wrote: post #75
lupusreal wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#108

Post by [deleted] »

pjc50 wrote: post #86
lupusreal wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

[deleted]

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#110

Post by philipallstar »

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...

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