I got sucked into running the numbers on that "delete emails to save water" thing. Best estimates I can find are that live datacentre storage in the UK has a median water usage of ~80ml/GB/year. So a terabyte of cloud storage consumes 80 litres a year.
Network losses from leaks are on the order of 10-15,000 litres per person per year.
Glad we can see the culprit is definitely old forwarded cat photos.
If you cut your daily shower by half a second you'll save enough water for a few hundred GB of ongoing storage. Buying one less t-shirt a year saves 20 TB worth of water. Not having a garden sprinkler in the summer is pushing towards the water usage of a whole PB of drives.
There are things we do with lower water impact than "file emails", but it's hard to imagine what they are.
DEFRA are claiming some exciting numbers - "datacenters burned an average of 0.441 liters of freshwater per kilowatt ... deleting 1,000 emails with attachments could save about 77.5 liters of water in a year" (https://www.404media.co/uk-asks-people-to-delete-emails-in-order-to-save-water-during-drought/)
Assuming a 10mb attachment on every email, their figures are implying something like 7.75 l/GB/year, or two orders of magnitude more than the ones we're looking at here. That's definitely a big gap.
@flooey come to think of it, electricity costs in the region of 25p/kWh now, so their numbers would imply £4,400/TB/year.
I ... have some doubts that that's the going rate.
When you pee or sweat, you lose the images again
(Garden sprinklers are useful though if your garden attracts pollinators and whatnot. Lawn sprinklers can die in a fire.)
@generalising Honestly, I cannot understand why they made that recommendation...
Is it ignorance, personal agenda, intentional deceit?
Like, even if you want to push personal actions, there's hundreds of other more impactful actions. Get a rain barrel, get rid of your grass, take shorter showers, more efficient laundry and dishwasher, more efficient toilet, more efficient taps.
Hell, I remember this kind of ignorant "advice" in our water-limited city in Canada. People would say "ask for no glass of water in restaurants" or "reuse your glass of water if you don't drink it all". And I'm like...I need to save like 1000 wasted cups of water a day in order for the equivalent of a single short shower. Some perspective is useful.
Fortunately in the case of our city's official policy, it was much more effective. They were good about fixing leaks (because they had to be) so individual actions was all that was left, but between the replace your toilet program, shower head programs, general "reduce your use" advertising, and restrictions on watering your grass, they managed to reduce by more than half the average consumption per capita in the city. It can be done, but intelligent policies are needed.
> Is it ignorance, personal agenda, intentional deceit?
My bet: it's an "AI" generated talking point with "AI" editing on top, and this office's use of those tools will consume far more water than this recommendation will save across all of Britain.
Maybe possible. But also, don't discount the possibility of this being a human thing. The total non-sequitur of it kinda makes me suspect that.
@Almandine @generalising Given there are only 11 principal aquifers in the UK, my guess is sqrt(naff all), and because it's an aquifer it will take some time for water to filter down.
Most water is going to come from reservoirs.
I suppose the real question is just where the leaks are, and the cost and time to fix them. If you want to fix water shortages quickly is the priority new reservoirs or fixing leaks? Although obviously it should be a case of AND.
@generalising @Almandine Thanks, that got a laugh!
There must have been some truly deep corruption and costs to getting water companies to fund new reservoirs.
Even before the water companies were privatised there were water shortages. I definitely remember news reports of standpipes which I can't imagine people would go for today, but by the end of the 80s I was only just leaving school so remembering the news wasn't a huge priority.
Here we are 35 years later and zero new reservoirs. There's Banbury Flood Storage according to Wikipedia, but I don't think that counts.
@Almandine @generalising I like that. As far as I'm aware, yes, osmosis and desalination has improved considerably. It's still expensive though, which will be why it isn't used.
I did a quick Google : https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/how-much-energy-does-desalinisation
Much better than it was, but still too much. The UK power grid (under invested : seeing a pattern here?) has been very close to the limit over past winters, it doesn't need any additional demands.
I suppose given most droughts occur in the summer, it could be worth exploring a reverse osmosis plant. Particularly if it could be powered entirely from renewable energy, as especially when there's a surplus of renewables.
@generalising well it wouldn't work like that anyways because stored emails would be a static file on some harddrive.
the creation, access and destruction of that file is what would actually cost the most energy and thus produce heat and thus cost more water.
so actually deleting emails would cost water not save it.
@generalising
So a typical cumulus cloud contains enough water for 3.1 petabytes of data storage in the cloud!
I'm so glad you did the groundwork for this calculation. According to Reading University, a typical cloud contains 250 Tonnes of water - 250,000 Litres. https://research.reading.ac.uk/research-blog/2020/07/24/how-much-do-clouds-weigh/
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mirabilosstatuses, so boost all the cat pawtos@wanwizard I think these are including upstream estimates, not necessarily on site usage - data storage uses X many kWh, that many kWh is associated with Y many litres of water usage in the generation process, divide by capacity Z to get a water per storage estimate.
I got the estimate from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2022.133633 (specifically the median UK value in the appendix)
@generalising Clear.
So for our DC, given the fact it is powered by 100% renewables and it doesn't use water for cooling, we're ok.
Which was more the reason for me asking...
@generalising That's probably less than I'm sweating out in the hot isle at the moment and need to drink when I'm done anyway.
What happened with datacentres being a nice 15°C? It is an oven in here... 😉
how much water does an annoying AI search engine result use ?
@[email protected] to put some numbers on it, one of our hosting VMs has ~1200 mailboxes using 1.5TB of SSD. Accounting for the CPU + RAM to allow the mail to be usable and searchable, you can get ~20 such servers on our standard 1U VM host, that uses ~250W. Approx 24k mailboxes on a server. A standard DC with adiabatic cooling would evaporate at most (likely much less) than 3500l of water per server per year or 145ml per account. We're in Telehouse South which uses 40x less water ~ 3ml/mailbox/year.
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