> 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.
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.
Nevermind water, there were (still are?) restrictions on new builds in the West London area because the grid could not cope due to the ever increasing number of data centres popping up in old trading estates.
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.
To be fair, it's not so much this government that should be blamed for chronic mismanagement - they inherited the situation. I would like to blame Thatcher for privatisation of essential monopolies and also the water company management for essentially diverting as much money as possible from their customers into their own pockets - Thames Water being the prime example of huge debts being created and money not being spent on upgrading infrastructure.
> The irony is that deletion is one of the most expensive operations in data infrastructure
I’m pretty sure the true irony is the government—an entity ostensibly at the service of its citizens—asking said denizens to perform low-impact actions detrimental to themselves so that massive faceless corporations can continue to exploit them with impunity while reaping massive profits and laughing all the way to the bank.
I used to work on the system at Google which processed deleted emails to ensure they are deleted across all systems it might have touched (eg, delete any calendar events created by the email, rebuild indexes, delete backup restore keys etc). Deleting an email was remarkably significantly more resource intensive compared to just leaving it alone, so this advice could only make the situation worse.
Do you happen to know why deleting lots of emails at once doesn't really work? Gmail that is. Select all 100k or so, delete, gets rid of the first N but not the rest, and N is order of some hundreds. It means delete old emails is far more time intensive than it should be.
> Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.
Let's ignore that most emails will be in semi-cold storage. Let's ignore that energy usage per email would be absolutely minimum. Did they not consider that thousands of people hitting the email servers requesting to view and then subsequently delete emails, wouldn't be an issue?
What I (tongue-in-cheek) suspect is that GCHQ and the like are having difficulty in searching so many emails. Maybe by reviewing the email it triggers a filter policy which aids in searching them. After all, the Online Safety Act mostly seems to be targetting data in transit.
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.
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 fresh water issue. I'm assuming some sort of closed system where evaporation isn't an issue to leave deposits. Saltwater would also have a lower freezing temp, so you could chill the water cooler than fresh as well.
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 at the moment.
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.
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.
I want a breakdown of how much energy would be saved by deleting old emails vs energy spent by people using VPNs now because of the Online Safety Act :)
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
Some of the responses here are assuming that your old emails are sat there, quiescent. A better model might be that they are part of a dataset that is actively scanned, repeatedly, so deleting them makes those scanning processes more efficient.
Exactly what those processes might be is left as an exercise for the reader.
In theory if you delete enough you can power off a server.
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).
The only thing I can think of is that emails accumulate that that means more storage must be added at the data centres, requiring more electricity use. This seems trivial compared to AI power demands to me.
Storing pictures and emails in a data center does generate heat, but it is negligible. Also, claims of data center water usage are heavily overstated. Some do, but only during summer months. I assume the reason for the UK’s asinine advice is because of they think there is a link between heat generation and water usage at data centers. While a link does exist, it is not straight forward.
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.
Knowing the UK government it wouldn't surprise me if we start getting regular emails or text messages reminding us to regularly delete our old emails and text messages to save water
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 washing the green mould off my late father's house, leading to a lot of water usage. And yes, I did use a lot of water then, far more than could be saved by skipping showers, using the dishwasher instead of hand washing crockery and by only boiling the water I needed for tea, nevermind deleting emails.
There will always be some that consume water at an entirely different scale to others, there needs to be a pricing mechanism for this beyond the metering they have now, where everyone gets an allowance for their basic needs and those watering gardens, washing cars or power-spraying houses pay considerably more.
There will be
Public advisory: Domestic water consumption is about 2% of the total. 98% is farming and industry. A 50% reduction in domestic water use would equate to a -1% change, which could also be accomplished with only a ~1.10% reduction by industry.
Given that emails could contain adult material, and that you need to register yourself to view adult materials in the UK, what is one to do if they want to delete emails in their web-based email service of choice but hasn't registered?
"Oi oi, stop right there, in the name of His Majesty the King. 'ave you a deleting loicence?"
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 amounts of water to cool their systems.
How effective those measures would be?
(I do not understand the down-votes, it is a great way to hear other people's opinion(s). Is that so bad?)
> Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day.
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).
> Install a rain butt to collect rainwater to use in the garden.
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.
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.
With the exception of the asinine piece of advice at the end, given that such advice likely has around for decades, I cannot imagine it being very effective anymore as the measures suggested should already be in effect.
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.
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 prices to encourage additional supply and build around actual needs rather than judging whats a valid use of the resource
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.
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.
This is "plastic straws" bullshit. From the statement, quoted from "The Environment Agency’s Director of Water and NDG chair, Helen Wakeham"
> "Water companies must continue to quickly fix leaks and lead the way in saving water. We know the challenges farmers are facing and will continue to work with them, other land users, and businesses to ensure everyone acts sustainably.
> We are grateful to the public for following the restrictions, where in place, to conserve water in these dry conditions. Simple, everyday choices – such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails – also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife."
Watch how the bait and switch operates. The privatized water companies are (a) bankrupt and (b) leaking hundreds of millions of liters of water (figures quoted in the 500m - 600m region for Thames Water). However, this is politically difficult to fix because it requires the government to do something and maybe even spend some money. So they put out a statement which implies that ordinary people could do something to help, even if it's literally a drop in the bucket.
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.
The problem isn’t home usage, or data centers. It’s the total lack of investment since the water companies were privatised and moved to a model of money extraction for shareholders. Now we have no new capacity in years and more leaks (waste and clean) than ever, and yet it’s always the public who need to save a little more or pay increased bills.
Successive governments (both sides) have been shown to be totally spineless with water regulation, despite significant public outrage. Privatisation has been a huge failure and yet we appear to be stuck in this position.
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.
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...
Yes, direct immersion cooling coupled with an organic rankine cycle could do this. But you won't recover much electricity because of the relatively low temperature of the heat source- 60 to 70 deg c dielectric fluid.
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.
Nine new reservoirs are planned by 2050 apparently. But as general point reservoirs are...
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.
You can't delete emails. They are retained by the provider that sent, the provider that received, and the government which got them from both and intercepted in the middle just to be sure.
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.
Data centers don't really "use" water; it gets released back into the environment one way or another. What matters is whether the data center is in a water-stressed region. According to the article:
> The remaining areas are normal: Hertfordshire, London, Kent, Devon and Cornwall.
So maybe the advice should be to migrate your workloads from regional data centers into London data centers.
Someone explain to me why this matters please. The emails (passively) stored on HDD/SSDs in a data centre wouldn't be the main contributor to heat generation and the needs for cooling.
What would probably increase heat and the need for cooling more meaningfully is actual data transfer and processing (i.e, reading and sending emails). But even so, compared to all the other internet activities (streaming video, gaming, AWS/Azure/GCP).. it's probably a drop in the bucket.
Conservatives: "Build all the data centers you want! The rate payers will he happy to pick up the cost. What's that, water? You should have thought of that before you became the unwashed masses!"
Liberals: "The capitalists are going to build data centers. It's inevitable. Progress and all that. It's up to us to mitigate the drought by showering less and deleting the emails!"
I was going to include the far-left position, but hey, they don't have a chance in hell of breaking through the capitalist two-party system. The prognosis is not good.
dbushell|6 months ago
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/government/news/prime-minister-sets-out-b...
tim333|6 months ago
ViktorRay|6 months ago
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.
mytailorisrich|6 months ago
pinoy420|6 months ago
[deleted]
jandrewrogers|6 months ago
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.
ndsipa_pomu|6 months ago
latexr|6 months ago
I’m pretty sure the true irony is the government—an entity ostensibly at the service of its citizens—asking said denizens to perform low-impact actions detrimental to themselves so that massive faceless corporations can continue to exploit them with impunity while reaping massive profits and laughing all the way to the bank.
woleium|6 months ago
Darkskiez|6 months ago
JonChesterfield|6 months ago
bArray|6 months ago
Let's ignore that most emails will be in semi-cold storage. Let's ignore that energy usage per email would be absolutely minimum. Did they not consider that thousands of people hitting the email servers requesting to view and then subsequently delete emails, wouldn't be an issue?
What I (tongue-in-cheek) suspect is that GCHQ and the like are having difficulty in searching so many emails. Maybe by reviewing the email it triggers a filter policy which aids in searching them. After all, the Online Safety Act mostly seems to be targetting data in transit.
milliams|6 months ago
dylan604|6 months ago
dylan604|6 months ago
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 fresh water issue. I'm assuming some sort of closed system where evaporation isn't an issue to leave deposits. Saltwater would also have a lower freezing temp, so you could chill the water cooler than fresh as well.
pjc50|6 months ago
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.
bee_rider|6 months ago
ryao|6 months ago
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.
black6|6 months ago
lupusreal|6 months ago
davidgerard|6 months ago
xenocratus|6 months ago
arkensaw|6 months ago
Encouraging people to log on and delete old pics and emails is only going to create more heat as servers have to spin up access to stuff.
The real culprit of data-center heat usage is surely AI
sour-taste|6 months ago
regularfry|6 months ago
Exactly what those processes might be is left as an exercise for the reader.
philipwhiuk|6 months ago
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).
pivo|6 months ago
ryao|6 months ago
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.
micromacrofoot|6 months ago
aranw|6 months ago
Theodores|6 months ago
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 washing the green mould off my late father's house, leading to a lot of water usage. And yes, I did use a lot of water then, far more than could be saved by skipping showers, using the dishwasher instead of hand washing crockery and by only boiling the water I needed for tea, nevermind deleting emails.
There will always be some that consume water at an entirely different scale to others, there needs to be a pricing mechanism for this beyond the metering they have now, where everyone gets an allowance for their basic needs and those watering gardens, washing cars or power-spraying houses pay considerably more. There will be
incone123|6 months ago
irthomasthomas|6 months ago
lenerdenator|6 months ago
"Oi oi, stop right there, in the name of His Majesty the King. 'ave you a deleting loicence?"
benjojo12|6 months ago
luke-stanley|6 months ago
A study on this would be pretty interesting.
This is a national disgrace and I am ashamed.
concinds|6 months ago
arkensaw|6 months ago
sc970|6 months ago
johnisgood|6 months ago
(I do not understand the down-votes, it is a great way to hear other people's opinion(s). Is that so bad?)
tomatocracy|6 months ago
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).
philipwhiuk|6 months ago
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.
nradov|6 months ago
SoftTalker|6 months ago
ryao|6 months ago
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.
bko|6 months ago
pjc50|6 months ago
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.
tim333|6 months ago
agentultra|6 months ago
[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0298
bee_rider|6 months ago
sugarpimpdorsey|6 months ago
pjc50|6 months ago
> "Water companies must continue to quickly fix leaks and lead the way in saving water. We know the challenges farmers are facing and will continue to work with them, other land users, and businesses to ensure everyone acts sustainably.
> We are grateful to the public for following the restrictions, where in place, to conserve water in these dry conditions. Simple, everyday choices – such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails – also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife."
Watch how the bait and switch operates. The privatized water companies are (a) bankrupt and (b) leaking hundreds of millions of liters of water (figures quoted in the 500m - 600m region for Thames Water). However, this is politically difficult to fix because it requires the government to do something and maybe even spend some money. So they put out a statement which implies that ordinary people could do something to help, even if it's literally a drop in the bucket.
see https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/land-use-biodiversity...
Seanambers|6 months ago
Its insanity.
Give powers to idiots and they will come up with stuff like this.
PeterStuer|6 months ago
philipallstar|6 months ago
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisor...
unknown|6 months ago
[deleted]
Fizzadar|6 months ago
Successive governments (both sides) have been shown to be totally spineless with water regulation, despite significant public outrage. Privatisation has been a huge failure and yet we appear to be stuck in this position.
Bender|6 months ago
AvAn12|6 months ago
miunau|6 months ago
lytfyre|6 months ago
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.
roryirvine|6 months ago
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...
fluorinerocket|6 months ago
pjc50|6 months ago
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.
mytailorisrich|6 months ago
So turn the tap off while brushing your teeth and delete your old emails, and all will be fine.
aldous|6 months ago
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
sna1l|6 months ago
pixelpoet|6 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
Am4TIfIsER0ppos|6 months ago
bifftastic|6 months ago
blitzar|6 months ago
crinkly|6 months ago
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.
ratelimitsteve|6 months ago
unknown|6 months ago
[deleted]
zahirbmirza|6 months ago
dylan604|6 months ago
jl6|6 months ago
> The remaining areas are normal: Hertfordshire, London, Kent, Devon and Cornwall.
So maybe the advice should be to migrate your workloads from regional data centers into London data centers.
t_tsonev|6 months ago
cactacea|6 months ago
By your definition nothing uses water as long as hydrolysis isn't involved?
drcongo|6 months ago
sparkie|6 months ago
dylan604|6 months ago
Insanity|6 months ago
What would probably increase heat and the need for cooling more meaningfully is actual data transfer and processing (i.e, reading and sending emails). But even so, compared to all the other internet activities (streaming video, gaming, AWS/Azure/GCP).. it's probably a drop in the bucket.
jasonthorsness|6 months ago
Havoc|6 months ago
pacifika|6 months ago
josefritzishere|6 months ago
lesser-shadow|6 months ago
nenadg|6 months ago
drweevil|6 months ago
Liberals: "The capitalists are going to build data centers. It's inevitable. Progress and all that. It's up to us to mitigate the drought by showering less and deleting the emails!"
I was going to include the far-left position, but hey, they don't have a chance in hell of breaking through the capitalist two-party system. The prognosis is not good.
incone123|6 months ago