Join Nostr
2025-08-13 09:39:53 UTC

Cllr Sam Easterby-Smith on Nostr: Data at rest is absolutely an environmental problem. Bite me. If *for example* ...

Data at rest is absolutely an environmental problem. Bite me.

If *for example* everyone in the UK has a terabyte of stuff in the cloud, that’s 60,000,000 terabytes.

Estimates vary wildly but the energy use of 1TB in the cloud is somewhere in the 40-70kWh per year range, so let’s call it 50. That makes 3 terawatt hours in total per year for the whole uk population. And growing.

In trying to decarbonise and lower the energy bills of data centres, easy mode is to use more water for cooling. 1/