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More hosepipe bans are now starting to come into force to help tackle water shortages during the increasingly dry summer months. Partly as the response to that, the UK Government’s Environment Agency (EA) has recently begun recommending that people help to save water by “deleting old emails to reduce pressure on data centre servers“.
The latest water saving tip of wonder comes alongside a list of all the usual suspects, such as a recommendation for people to take shorter showers, turning off taps when brushing teeth, using full loads for washing machines and dishwashers, and of course collecting rainwater for garden use. So to find the suggestion of deleting old emails alongside those somewhat logical tips does seem a little.. odd.
The idea behind this is that data centres can apparently consume significant amounts of water, primarily for cooling servers and associated infrastructure. Some studies have shown that a typical data centre can use hundreds of thousands, even millions, of gallons of water per day (here and here). But it should be said that a lot of those studies come from the USA and involved a baseline of data centres in areas with arid, or semi-arid, climates.
The reality for a country like the UK, where the climate is much more variable – often colder rather than hotter – tends to be more complex. Quite a few of those past studies have also failed to take into account modern energy efficiency improvements and the rising use of closed loop systems, where water gets recycled multiple times before being replaced. Some water will then be lost to evaporation, while the rest is relatively clean and returned to the environment through various means.
Environment Agency Statement
Data centres are fundamental to growth, industry and society. Data centres store information ranging from medical records to photos on your phone. They also support many online services, from Artificial Intelligence (AI) to managing email and messaging. Data centres can require a large amount of water for cooling processes and there is the potential for a new large demand as more data centres are built.
Water availability needs to be considered when data centres are being planned, and consideration given to the water requirements of the cooling technology selected as well as where the data centre is being located. Data centres should look to other supplies of water beyond using Public Water Supply, for example using recycled water.
We want to continue to work with stakeholders to see how water resources planning for data centres can be improved. We are currently working with key representative bodies to collect data from the sector to increase our understanding of their current and future water needs. Such data is vital for long term planning and further collaboration is needed.
Naturally, email processing and storage does thus end up contributing to water usage in data centres, particularly since many of us do use online storage / cloud-based solutions for such services (Hotmail, Gmail etc.). Due to this, the government is clearly trying to connect the dots and raise awareness around the subtle impacts of that large inbox of stored email history that keeps growing year-on-year, and which many people rarely delete.
However, it’s worth remembering that some people do store emails locally too, and there’s clearly quite a big debate to be had around how much of an impact failing to delete old emails is actually having on the specific problem of water usage. We’d argue the impact may be exaggerated and then there’s the irony of how actually deleting your emails, while reducing storage, also increases processing and thus the heat that must be removed.
The fact of the matter may be that, if we’re going to talk about the load on data centres, then perhaps it would be better to start by reducing the collective use of processor intensive consumer AI solutions (or making it more efficient) and not to mention the many Internet Messaging platforms that also retain long cloud-stored records of your chat history etc.
Put another way, we can think of various other – perhaps more impactful – ways of cutting water usage in data centres than scaring people into deleting that ancient email from [INSERT ANY COMPANY NAME HERE]. In fact, a better approach, rather than simple deletion, may be to have a run through of your inbox to ensure that your SPAM filter is preventing unwanted emails from continuing to reach your account in the first place (where possible).
The reality is that deleting a bunch of old emails probably isn’t going to stop a drought, and we think the overall impact level remains highly debatable, although it certainly would have some collective impact. But the free email providers will of course be happy with any suggestion that users should clean up their inbox.