3 days ago
Deleting emails to save water is really, really silly, says expert
The environmental watchdog is 'really, really silly' to suggest that deleting emails could help resolve the drought, a veteran data centre analyst has said.
On Tuesday the Environment Agency suggested that people should not only cut short their showers to save water, but also delete old emails and pictures, because 'data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems'.
But Gary Barnett, formerly the chief technology analyst at the consulting company GlobalData, has calculated that people would have to delete tens of thousands of emails just to make up for one extra second in the shower.
Barnett estimated that in order to store five gigabytes of data — equivalent to tens of thousands of emails — a data centre would only need to be cooled with 79 millilitres of water. He said: 'A shower will consume between 10 and 15 litres a minute. So in other words, if you stopped your shower one second sooner, you would cover the water for your five gigabytes of emails.
'A leaky toilet might leak 200-400 litres a day. It's orders of magnitude greater.'
Barnett said he was 'irritated' that the government had put together a list of 'sensible' ways that people could save water, such as avoiding watering their lawns, fixing leaky lavatories and turning off the tap while brushing their teeth, but 'appended this nonsense at the end'.
WITTHAYA PRASONGSIN/GETTY IMAGES
He added: 'The problem is that if they say something so silly, it detracts so much from the other message.'
After the driest start to the year since 1976, five regions of England are dealing with drought. Dry summer weather is expected to become the norm as the burning of fossil fuels continues to warm the climate.
With Britain's population also increasing, the Environment Agency has estimated that the country could face a shortage of five billion litres of water per day by 2055. To help avoid this shortage, the Environment Agency has recommended that people cut their average water usage by 15 litres a day, to 110 litres. The government estimates that deleting 1,000 emails with attachments would save 0.2 litres a day.
Britain's data centres are consuming close to ten billion litres of water a year at least, but Barnett argued that storing emails is one of their least water-draining activities. He said: 'It is true that massive data centres are going to place big, big demands on power grids and indeed on the water supply, but I just don't think that photos of granny's birthday are the culprit.'
Chris Preist, a professor of sustainability and computing systems at the University of Bristol, said that many emails sent in Britain are stored in data centres in other countries, using up water elsewhere. He added that the act of deleting emails would probably increase water usage, because it is more energy-intensive to access an email than it is to store it.
He said: 'Providing advice that is not evidence-based can result in the loss of trust in the [Environment] agency. That's a real issue when we're thinking about climate change and drought. We need government agencies that we can trust.'
