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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

#91

Post by pjc50 »

AvAn12 wrote: post #39

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?

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.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#92

Post by mrob »

reedf1 wrote: post #43
sour-taste wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#93

Post by black6 »

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…

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.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#94

Post by pjc50 »

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…

> 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.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#95

Post by incone123 »

Theodores wrote: post #19

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…

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.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#96

Post by scrlk »

stoobs wrote: post #27
sna1l wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#97

Post by miunau »

AvAn12 wrote: post #39

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.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#99

Post by jandrewrogers »

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.

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