Blaming drought on old emails is madness
A UK government agency is blaming the upcoming drought on cooling of datacentres and suggested deleting old emails.
This unfortunately highlights a fundamental lack of understanding of several infrastructure systems that are vital for running a functioning country in the 21st century and fails to acknowledge the leading position of the region in a key technology..
The comments come in official advice from the UK government as the National Drought Group met to as the current water shortfall situation in England is now a “nationally significant incident.”
Five areas are officially in drought, with six more experiencing prolonged dry weather following the driest six months to July since 1976 as the National Drought Group met to discuss the problem.
“Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems,” says the advice, which was also highlighted by the Director of Water at the Environment Agency and chair of the NDG, Helen Wakeham.
“The current situation is nationally significant, and we are calling on everyone to play their part and help reduce the pressure on our water environment,” she said. “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.”
Absolutely do not do that. Those old emails and pictures are stored on disk drives that use air cooling.
These are only spun up as required and do not use water cooling for storage. The act of deleting them will use a processor that will use more energy.
Water cooling is mainly used for AI systems for that innocent query to ChatGPT. However in many cases the datacentre will use a closed loop system with heat exchangers to extract the heat such as the system developed by HPE and used in the UK’s largest AI supercomputer, Isambard AI in Bristol (shown above with the blue and red pipes representing cool water in and hot water out).
For Isambard AI, there are plans to use the waste heat from these heat exchangers to power nearby houses in a community heat and power (CHP) system. Other datacentres are being built with immersion cooling that does not use water but a dielectric fluid, and the UK is a leading developer of this technology through companies such as Iceotope in the UK.
The advice is misguided on so many levels.
The vast majority of datacentres that store such data are also in the London area, while the drought is impacting the north of the country. The data is also likely to be stored elsewhere in the EU or even in the US where there are not the same water restrictions.
The liquid cooling also reduces the energy requirements of the datacentre, reducing the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere if the centre is not using renewable energy as a source.
The group does acknowledge that a major part of the problem is leaking pipes that have not been addressed by the privatised water companies in the UK, and this is an issue that has been flagged every summer.
Five areas are officially in drought, with six more experiencing prolonged dry weather following the driest six months to July since 1976. Recent rainstorms and showers helped mask the fact that July was still the fifth warmest on record.
The NDG includes the Met Office, government, regulators, water companies, the National Farmers’ Union, Canal & River Trust, anglers, and conservation experts – used the meeting to highlight the water-saving measures each sector is taking.
This highlights the critical nature of the water infrastructure, just as the UK government is highlighting the critical nature of the AI infrastructure and investing up to £7bn to build more datacentres. Using planning conditions to requiring these datacentres to have closed loop cooling is a simple, quick solution to the issue, and gives the opportunity to boost the world leading UK and European innovation in this area.
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
