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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

#111

Post by throwawayoldie »

ViktorRay wrote: post #82
dbushell wrote: post #3

> 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/govern…

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.

I imagine he was probably still pretty salty about the whole Gollancz/Homage to Catalonia thing.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#112

Post by tim333 »

dbushell wrote: post #3

> 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/govern…

I'm surprised anyone wants to put a data center in the UK given our top of the range electricity costs.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#113

Post by KineticLensman »

sna1l wrote: post #13
mytailorisrich wrote: post #7

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.

seriously wtf ... it rains all the time there :)

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.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#114

Post by bee_rider »

dylan604 wrote: post #33
milliams wrote: post #4

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

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.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#115

Post by Ray20 »

pjc50 wrote: post #83
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'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…

> 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.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#117

Post by [deleted] »

philipallstar wrote: post #110

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...

[deleted]

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#118

Post by bee_rider »

bko wrote: post #50

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 p…

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.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#119

Post by tim333 »

bko wrote: post #50

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 p…

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.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#120

Post by tim333 »

agentultra wrote: post #70
bko wrote: post #50

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 p…

I'm not an expert but it sounds like fresh water reserves across the planet are shrinking. It is a finite resource [0]. [0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0298

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.
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