UK government urges Brits to "delete emails and photos" to save water

[midian182]

WTF?! The UK is in the middle of a drought, and the government is asking citizens to do their part to help. In addition to taking the usual steps to alleviate the water shortage, the government is asking people to "delete their old emails and pictures."

The UK is experiencing the kind of consistent hot and dry weather rarely seen in a country with summer temperatures averaging between 48°F and 64°F – the last six months leading to July have been its driest since 1976.

The water shortfall situation has now become a "nationally significant incident." Five areas are officially in a drought, and six more are going through prolonged dry weather.

The UK's National Drought Group (NDG) has therefore issued guidance on how to save water at home. It includes the usual advice such as not watering lawns, taking shorter showers, fixing leaky toilets, and generally not being wasteful, but something we've never seen before is the suggestion to "delete old emails and pictures as data centers require vast amounts of water to cool their systems."

Being told to clear out one's inbox to save water is certainly causing a lot of controversy. Data centers do use a lot of water through evaporative cooling – the current global footprint is estimated at around 560 billion liters per year.

However, it's highly unlikely that Brits deleting their unwanted emails and pictures is going to make much of a difference, especially as the storage devices in these centers create little heat once the data is stored. It's noted that searching for old data from your cloud backups could actually use more energy and water in the short term than leaving them alone. There's also the possibility that the data center storing your files is located in another country.

Something that could do more to save water is for the UK to ease up on its use of generative AI. According to an environmental report published by French model builder Mistral AI, a 400 token response – about a page worth of text – consumed about 45 ml of water and generated about 1.14 grams of CO2e.

When millions of people are using these AI tools, that adds up to a lot of water. Ironically, the UK government has been praising AI and committed to growing its use in the country.

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UK government urges Brits to "delete emails and photos" to save water

 

[seeprime]

This is really odd. How about penalizing the company that's actually using the water.

 

[return]

I will delete only if the gov delete their online ID bs law.

 

[letsgoiowa]

It doesn't even make any logical sense. If it's on a hard drive it's just a few bits that are sitting there and it isn't taking up significant power at all and those drives certainly aren't water cooled. What are they getting at?

 

[Burty117]

It doesn't even make any logical sense. If it's on a hard drive it's just a few bits that are sitting there and it isn't taking up significant power at all and those drives certainly aren't water cooled. What are they getting at?

If the UK Government said something, it’s probably not worth listening to. Everything they say is brain rottingly stupid or pointless.

 

[Anton Longshot]

Also, people shouldn't cry. Peeing should be outlawed too. Rain is a terrible waste as well. All rivers should be dammed so the water can't get away.

See? These are all easy fixes. Joking BUT probably more effective than deleting old data.

 

[Melkor Unlimited]

It doesn't even make any logical sense. If it's on a hard drive it's just a few bits that are sitting there and it isn't taking up significant power

Less data ---> Less drives to work ---> less energy consumed --> less heat generated --->less cooling needed

... those drives certainly aren't water cooled.

Directly? Probably not.
But with the amount of heat generated by datacenter air conditioning is no the way.
Heat is taken by some medium and transported from server room somewere where it could be dissipated (= medium cooled down and send back to server room).
Phase change liquid water to water vapor (evaporating) takes a lot of heat from that medium. And that is the point where water is needed as some water vapor is lost into environment.

 

[pnntmp]

That's ... grotesque

Total, complete, unhinged idiocy.
The UK government is a laughingstock.

How deleting a file saves water?
To start with, if you delete a file - no information is actually deleted. Just the space it occupies is marked as free. If the information is actually deleted - that is, overwritten with zeros - this may eventually waste a drop of water because it will generate a ridiculously microscopic amount of waste heat.

So deleting anything actually wastes water, theoretically. Practically, it doesn't matter at all.

 

[Miles O]

Just because some space is removed from a server drive does not mean that server drive will be powered down. Just more non-sense from government officials who know next to nothing about technology but love telling their citizens how they can and can’t use it.

 

[MiqWalsh]

So.....we're all supposed to go without most of the things that help to make life bearable, just so that massive corporations can continue to pollute the atmosphere AND waste the planet's natural resources?

I'm lost for words. And I have to live in this joke of a country.....where all the govt. does is to suck up to the Orange Man as hard as they can. What can you expect from a PM that trained as a barrister, and was at one time the Attorney General under Tony Blair? He was never politician material in the first place.......and spent his entire career being the ultimate "Yes" man!

(*rolls eyes...*)


Miq.

 

[airbornex]

The idea of saving a drought by deleting cat memes feels like trying to stop climate change by switching fonts in Word.

 

[acrossthestars]

You know the reason it's called the UK? Because "it ain't for U, K?"

Now, get back to the fields, you organic pissant! Lady Gemini has decreed,"more fuel for the fire!"

 

[Angga B]

Why WTF? When you bombard highly neurotic population with "ending is nigh" message every single day then that's what you will get. And more.

 

[BuckarooBonzaii]

Let's not forget the thousands of commercial buildings in the UK using chillers and cooling towers for cooling and how much condensate water are being purged from these cooling towers to maintain the proper water PH level. Purging can be in thousands of gallons (5 digits) daily, weekly, monthly, whatever it takes. But since data centers have no people, they have to choose the lesser of two evils. Hopefully the data centers have the best energy efficient cooling systems.

 

[WaphleStomp]

Sure, but when Hillary did that she was crucified for a decade.

 

[3volv3d]

The water? The Thames water? The control of which will be given to China as they have a £17 billion debt. Made profit, gave it to share holders.
Because get rich and bail on the company you trashed is fine. Especially when it's actually a resource that everyone needs.
Waste time and money by allowing companies to dump toxic sewage into rivers. Don't fine them, just hike payments to the civilians. Prevention would be better than a clear up.

Everyday resources like water food, public transport, should be government controlled not privatised bastardised and ruined.
They would and should have to answer to the people. The infrastructure of the UK is so old and outdated, maybe if they had updated it we wouldn't be in this mess.
The UK government basically get massive paychecks for being massive w4nkaz and they do fk all for it.

 

[LimyG]

*****ic. It's already stored. A.I. use possibly, but this is ill informed. (I am a Brit btw.)

 

[Vanderlinde]

It doesn't even make any logical sense. If it's on a hard drive it's just a few bits that are sitting there and it isn't taking up significant power at all and those drives certainly aren't water cooled. What are they getting at?

Servers are pretty much 24/7 running with no power saving (or barely any) active. So if a socket is rated for lets say a couple of amps of power it likely will run at the max rating.

I guess the idea behind it is to start saving power by deleting older stuff and no longer having the need for a big redundancy. It's likely those email servers do contain backups and the backup back-end needs it's power and resources as well. We're not talking about one email inbox of one individual but likely hundreds up to a thousands depending on where you get your email from.

All that power consumed by those servers, will likely throw off heat and needs water to cool it. I guess it's just better to advise looking in the things that you could use less instead of more.

I don't need a public email service with risk of having their AI models trained onto my emails.

 

[Burty117]

So I've tested it with my home NAS:

74TB used out of 122TB - 47-52 Watts power draw

110TB used out of 122TB - 47-52 Watts power draw

Great power saving, great water saving, thanks UK Government! You're the best!

 

[Hysc84]

Might as well eliminate human better

 

[Y2JB47]

A completely fabricated story. This is not something anyone in the uk has said, heard or talked about.

 

[WaphleStomp]

So I've tested it with my home NAS:

74TB used out of 122TB - 47-52 Watts power draw

110TB used out of 122TB - 47-52 Watts power draw

Great power saving, great water saving, thanks UK Government! You're the best!

And it would likely be the same power level for 0TB used out of 122TB because after data is stored no power is required to maintain it on non-volatile memory. The only draw is writing the data to the storage medium and the power required to remain in the ON power state.

 

[LimyG]

So I've tested it with my home NAS:

74TB used out of 122TB - 47-52 Watts power draw

110TB used out of 122TB - 47-52 Watts power draw

Great power saving, great water saving, thanks UK Government! You're the best!

Thanks for the testing. Fascinating results. I expected MASSIVE power savings. [satire alert]

 

[Zsoltblabla]

This just shows how pathetic the UK is now. A country with (by far) most rain in Europe and tet after a week of actual summer the country is in panic mode!
Its like saying that the Sahara will run out of sand!

 

[Burty117]

This just shows how pathetic the UK is now. A country with (by far) most rain in Europe and tet after a week of actual summer the country is in panic mode!
Its like saying that the Sahara will run out of sand!

Ever since our water was privatised (1989) a single water reservoir was built aftwards (1992).
Close to no investment has gone into our water infrastructure since, yet our population has grown by 13 million.

Private water doesn't work without heavy government regulation, so heavy, it might as well not be private, it is insane that our government isn't making any plans to bring water supply back into the public domain.