UK Government Suggests Deleting Files To Save Water (theverge.com)
- Reference: 0178657212
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/08/12/1948203/uk-government-suggests-deleting-files-to-save-water
- Source link: https://www.theverge.com/science/758275/drought-delete-files-email-data-center-water-uk
> Can deleting old emails and photos help the UK tackle ongoing drought this year? That's the hope, according to recommendations for the public included in a press release today from the National Drought Group.
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> There are far bigger steps companies and policymakers can take to conserve water of course, but drought has gotten bad enough for officials to urge the average person to consider how their habits might help or hurt the situation. And the proliferation of data centers is raising concerns about how much water it takes to power servers and keep them cool.
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> "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," Helen Wakeham, Environment Agency Director of Water, said in the press release.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/science/758275/drought-delete-files-email-data-center-water-uk
Pretty sure (Score:2)
Pretty sure a single drive could store most of the UK's email throughout history, minus some particularly large emails with attachments.
Re: (Score:3)
Fuck's sake.
Look, ok, our PM is a former human rights lawyer (somehow) who has done a 180 into being a massive authoritarian who has more or less by his own admission no guiding principles. And the number of engineers in the cabinet is... 0.
Sign of the Times (Score:2)
That's to be expected because the UK is in decline. Engineers and scientists know how to build new things but when it comes to shutting things down you need lawyers.
Umm, that's not how it works (Score:1)
OK, in SOME situations file storage has an ongoing energy cost, but if the storage is local and the drive isn't anywhere near full,* any energy savings will be somewhere between zero and too small to measure.
I can see a small-but-measurable benefit if you are talking data-center-scale storage: If you cut storage needs by 1%, you will need to have 1% fewer drives or SSD drawing power at any given time, but IMHO it's not worth the effort.
*If the drive is nearly full, you (the user) may go out and buy a bigge
Re: Umm, that's not how it works (Score:2)
If millions of people deleted a lot of emails, maybe the local data centres could run fewer servers, with less data that needs to be online, smaller indexes to search.
Deleting files from your local drive makes no difference, they're not even water cooled from local rivers. But keeping more servers running in data centres to handle demand does
Enshitification (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, I’m getting old.
I’ve noticed the decay of logical thought process from politicians especially over the last 10 years.
For example, in Victoria Australia, the state government just paid a small fortune to place dozens of Machete amnesty bins around the city. I honestly thought it was an AI joke, yet they can’t afford to replace rural fire trucks.
As an engineer, it’s infuriating how ideology increasingly rules over logical thought process, and in the case of this article, complete nonsense makes its way into the public discourse.
Re:Enshitification (Score:5, Insightful)
The important thing for a politician is to be shown to do something . It doesn't matter if this something has effect or not. A performative activity that resembles a solution is often enough, and it's especially good if it keeps other politicians, legal consultants, and compliance auditors employed for at least the next few years.
Re: (Score:2)
Think it through. Where are most people's emails stored? Data centres, aka The Cloud. What do data centres use a lot of? Water.
If you delete old emails, it reduces the amount of storage needed for your account, which reduces the amount of spinning rust and powered up SSDs. When you search your emails, it reduces the amount of energy needed to sift through them.
All of which reduces water consumption.
Re: (Score:2)
> If you delete old emails, it reduces the amount of storage needed for your account, which reduces the amount of spinning rust and powered up SSDs.
Only if the data centers reduce their storage capacity proportionally by taking drives offline, which they generally won't. Of course, politicians being politicians, what they probably meant was that by deleting files you'll help keep the situation from getting worse .
If they really wanted to tell people to do something that would cut data center power consumption significantly, they'd ask people to stop using AI tools.
Re: (Score:2)
The volume of data is constantly growing, so it's more a case of it increasing more slowly.
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, but that's bullshit. People's personal emails are not a significant consumer of datacenter resources.
Training (Score:2)
> People's personal emails are not a significant consumer of datacenter resources.
No, but I bet the AI's that use those emails as training data are a very significant consumer and, if you are a clueless politician that makes it our fault for leaving all that data around for AI training purposes.
Re: (Score:2)
This isn't enshittification, this is you thinking your pet political issue trumps another pet political issue (note I agree with you in this case, rural firetrucks are probably more important) but you clearly haven't given this the slightest thought. Here's some logical thinking you yourself are missing:
a) The Australian government banned machetes. We have a long history of secure amnesty delivery working in the country. This program is a copy of the policy that eliminated mass shootings in Australia, just
Better Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a better idea: stop building the completely unnecessary data centers (I'd estimate that 99.99% of them are unnecessary), and abolish the stupid-ass AI-scam centers that are destroying water supplies. They are beyond useless and pointless.
Re: (Score:2)
>> stupid-ass AI-scam centers that are destroying water supplies
> Use smart-ass AI-scam centers with AI-controlled closed-loop or non-water-cooling systems so they don't destroy the water supplies. :)
> Oh, yeah, another rule: The AI-scam-center only gets to use electricity it produces on-site without destroying the environment (solar, wind, maybe tidal, geothermal, etc. but nothing polluting). And even another rule: It only gets to network with itself, not the outside world.
Just spitballing here, but I think the best way to power AI scam centers would be to power them via the hot-air produced by the AI prophet crowd. Imagine if you could harness the energy produced via Sam Altman's prodigious prognostications alone? Hells, that could probably solve every energy crisis for us for the next century!
Re: (Score:1)
[1]https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
[2]https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
[3]https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
[4]https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
[5]https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
[6]https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
[7]https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]
[8]https://slashdot.org/story/24/... [slashdot.org]
[9]https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/12/uk_gov_ai_datacenters/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/16/uk_overrules_local_council_approve_datacenter/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/13/uk_datacenter_planning_rules/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/15/uk_datacenter_investment/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/24/uk_mega_datacenter_approved/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/10/london_has_400_gw_of/
[7] https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/23/ireland-datacentres-overtake-electricity-use-of-all-homes-combined-figures-show
[8] https://slashdot.org/story/24/08/20/1714220/north-america-added-a-whole-silicon-valleys-worth-of-data-center-inventory-this-year
[9] https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/04/10/2019233/data-centres-will-use-twice-as-much-energy-by-2030
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly, StormReaver!
Deleting emails isn't going to cut back on the amount of water used to cool the server rack. What will save on the amount of water used to cool that server rack is turning it off!
Do we really need "AI" (actually, just a predictive text engine that can put words into a semblance of a sentence)? If you need to code something, maybe do the work yourself! If you want to know a fact, you can search the 'net or get a book! That kind of thing has worked for over a hundred years... I don't
Re: (Score:2)
Any hope of saving water by deleting emails was just wiped out by one person asking AI how to delete emails.
Thats stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
The hard drive is going to be running in the datacenter whether you store something on it or not. Deleting the email will cause more heat, because you'll have to process the info.
Re: (Score:1)
That's what I came to say: Accessing the file to delete it uses more energy than just leaving it alone.
Re: (Score:2)
> The hard drive is going to be running in the datacenter whether you store something on it or not. Deleting the email will cause more heat, because you'll have to process the info.
Yes, but they also said pictures. Have you never lifted a box full of photographs? Those things are heavy. One-thousand 4x6 photos weights 3 kg. Just think about how much extra energy it takes for a spinning disk with an extra 3 kg of pictures saved on it must use. According to Google 1TB can hold 25,000 to 500,000 pictures. Even on the low end, that's 1500 kg of extra weight on a 20TB spinning disk.
It's madness I tell you
Sincerely.
UK government
Re: (Score:3)
I think you missed the point (the point is stupid but that's no excuse for missing it). The point is not the HDD currently running, the point is that next email which causes an additional HDD to be added.
A great amount of our cloud storage in datacentres is dedicated to shit we'll never need or use and storage requirements in datacentres keep going up, they keep getting bigger, and they keep building more.
Has that answer originated from a google .. (Score:2)
.. ai search answer, in any way?
Because, just from the sound of it, it sounds like non-sense or just
"sh-AI-t"
My solution... (Score:5, Funny)
I ran a dedupe on my drive and eliminated 8 redundant copies of the goatse guy.
#SaveWaterWithGoatse
Re: (Score:2)
So you consider the other copies not redundant?
WWII (Score:1)
In World War II there was a [1]drive [londongardenstrust.org],in the UK, to collect old iron objects for melting into war material. The purpose was not to obtain metal but to manipulate the people.
[1] https://www.londongardenstrust.org/features/railings3.htm
Re: (Score:1)
Way to distort your own source.
"This is the view of John Farr, author of a recent article in Picture Postcard Monthly, ('Who Stole our Gates", PPM No 371, March 2010). In it he says that only 26% of the iron work collected was used for munitions..."
"Faced with an oversupply, rather than halt the collection, which had turned out to be a unifying effort for the country and of great propaganda value, the government allowed it to continue."
26% of it was used. The purpose WAS to obtain metal. They kept it goin
Re: (Score:1)
So you're admitting it was to manipulate people? Thanks.
Whensocial media iinfiltrates govt agencies... (Score:3)
It's very worrying because actual employees at the Environment Agency have read some social media articles about US data centers using water and extrapolated it to the UK without doing any research. Something like 95% of data centers in the UK are using air-cooled chillers for cooling. Zero water is being used in that case. A lot of sites use adiabatic cooling for cooling towers, spray for closed-loop air-cooled chillers, or adiabatic CRAH units, in my experience. A lot of that is recycled and reused.
Re: (Score:2)
Errr do you realise that adiabatic CRAH units actually have nothing to do with how cooling is achieved on the datacentre and everything to do with the internal loop. No one is complaining about that. Even adiabatic CRAH units typically rely on evaporative cooling (as do several others you list). This is precisely where the water waste comes from - the air chillers outside. They don't just use air as that is insanely inefficient.
Sites that don't waste water ironically are not air cooled but typically open lo
Still trying .. (Score:2)
... to get [1]Prince Andrew's [wikipedia.org] files deleted?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Andrew_%26_the_Epstein_Scandal
How about.. (Score:4, Insightful)
..arresting 30 British citizens a day less for saying something that doesn't adhere to government orthodoxy. I'd bet that would save a lot more.
Re: (Score:2)
Then those citizens would be free to have longer showers wasting even more water. Jessssus man think a bit before you speak! -This is sarcasm guys.
Re: (Score:2)
Or maybe not leveraging debt on the assets of a privatised national resource to pay huge bonuses and dividends, and instead using some of that money to upgrade infrastructure, build reservoirs, and fix leaks?
Duck and cover (Score:2)
Duck and cover. That one weird little trick you can do to defeat the A-bomb. Thank goodness for all those civil servants hard at work to govern you in the way that is best for you.
Deleting files to conserve cycles at the datacente (Score:2)
is like turning off the faucet to brush your teeth while 100 acres of farmland a few miles away are watered three times a day
From the comments (Score:1)
As posted in the comments:
instead of blaming the rest of us, we:
- Build some new reservoirs (none built in the last 30 years, despite massive population growth and the fact we were already having hosepipe bans 30 years ago).
- Regulate against building data centres that take away our drinking water (doesn't have to mean they can't exist - they could build their own water supplies).
- Tax datacentre owners on their water usage, and use that money to fund water infrastructure improvements, like fix
How much ? (Score:2)
Okay then, Miss Wakeman, *how much* energy will it save if I delete 1 MB of emails ?
And if it is indeed totally negligible and you are talking shit, will you resign ?
Re: (Score:2)
Energy, water, phlogiston or whatever nonsense you make-works are telling us to save this week.
Great idea (Score:2)
What we should do is train a specific AI model so that CoPilot can do this automatically. /s
What if we deleted all email old then 1-year? (Score:2)
What if we deleted all email old then 1-year? Seriously! The number of "inboxes" I've dealt with that are 10, 20, 30, 40+ GB, going back 10+ years, is comical, and sad. I have worked for people who brag about having 10+ years of email, swear on their life they need all of it, just in case, and then will ask me a question already answered in an email a week prior, it’s ridiculous. If you got rid of 99.999999% of all emails that have been stored, I bet no one would miss or notice.
Ignoring email,
The Donald has done his share (Score:5, Funny)
Deleting the Epstein files...
Re: (Score:1)
Came here to say exactly this, but out of mod points.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, but he did it to save his ass.