UK government advises deleting emails to save water

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.

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.

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.

Exactly what those processes might be is left as an exercise for the reader.

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).

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.

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).

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 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.

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.

[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0298

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.

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...

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.

By your definition nothing uses water as long as hydrolysis isn't involved?

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