The UK government saying "delete old emails" to save water. 🤦♂️
Most emails average about 50k of storage even for someone who gets a lot of attachments, and will have exactly zero effect on data center consumption.
"Don't use cryptocurrency" and "don't use generative AI" would of course be thousands of times more effective.
@MichaelTBacon The power use of storage at scale is roughly 1 W/TB, see for instance page 14 the presentation on storage for science: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1338689/contributions/6010862/
So that would put the storage of the average persons entire archive of old emails (say at most 10 GB) at about 1 kWh per decade?
Welcome! The CHEP conference series addresses the computing, networking and software issues for the world’s leading data‐intensive science experiments that currently analyse hundreds of petabytes of data using worldwide computing resources. The CHEP conference location rotates between the Americas, Asia and Europe, and is typically held eighteen months apart. The CHEP 2024 conference will be hosted by the AGH University of Kraków, Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences and...
Being generous, many people may have even close to 100 GB of email.
At the same time, your estimate it looks like comes from spinning disks. Most email storage from large vendors is going to be on hierarchical storage so old stuff is going to be either extra compressed or on tape. And according to that presentation, the tape is .13W/TB.
So it *might* be 4-5 kWh/decade?
@MichaelTBacon I did check my personal archive, and I've gotten a lot of emails in the last 25 years, it only added up to 12GB though. Of course, now that I think of it, anything other than the last couple of years is compressed.
We could just round that up to "less than 1 kWh/year" in either case. Or roughly equivalent to reducing the thermostat setting by 0.001 degrees for heating, if I got the numbers right.
Michael Bacon
maswan