The public doesn't hate Net Zero as much as RW politicians insist they do

Data centres also provide waste heat that can be used for district heating

Most data centres use evaporative cooling which isn't compatible with salt water. They absolutely could switch to systems that work with salt water but this will cost a bit more so I think instead you will just see extensive lobbying from the AI bros to please just be allowed to use all the drinking water because AI is the future and will figure out how to get free water and power for all blah blah blah.
Personally I think a rule for building the new types of large AI data centres in this country is that they use cooling systems that don't waste fresh water. But without being made to they won't spend more than they have to.

On the subject of nuclear power Rolls Royce are building small/medium nuclear reactors** as we speak. They could be used by data centres but could also be used by the grid as well to cover for times when the wind isn't blowing, the sun isnt shining etc. I don't think it will ever be cheaper than wind/solar but having a system in place that has mixed forms of energy creation is probably best.

**Technically they have been building reactors for years for submarines already. But this is a new type. And it's good because it's British manufacturing, British jobs etc.

Why would you want to use enormous amounts of electricity desalinating the sea water.
Data centres use large amounts of water for cooling purposes, they don't drink the stuff! You can simply take in cold seawater for cooling and return it as warm seawater in just the same way as power stations do.

Desalination plants use huge amounts of power. How are you going to power them when there's no wind nor sun? Then we ALSO need huge amounts of power to actually power the data centres too. I think we'd be back to needing nuclear to power BOTH the salination plant AND the data centre at the same time! If we go down that road, we'd need to find ways of using sea water without desalinating it which is probably possible. Or build data centres somewhere near fresh water supplies, i.e. run off streams from hills/mountains etc which may work when there's rain, but obviously limited use in droughts. Or expand hydro electric generations using tidal barrages etc.

Give that the UK is surrounded by sea, perhaps data centres should desalinate water using renewable energy, leaving drinking water for humans.

@MandingoAteMyBaby I've just found some country-by-country usage breakdowns on https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/water-consumption-by-country

In the UK, 14.05% of water is used in agriculture. This compares with 39.66% in the US (who are huge users of water in general) and 66.89% in Australia.

In terms of total usage, we're very frugal for a developed nation, consuming 123 cubic metres per capita. Germany 307, Netherlands 460, USA 1,301 - and that's per capita, remember, multiply by the massive population in the US to see how much water they waste in total.

So it's a worldwide statistic? It will include the use of irrigation in places like Arizona (a state well-known for being mostly desert) to grow alfalfa on behalf of the Saudis, draining the aquifers there. It's certainly a big issue there, a lot of people rely on groundwater to drink but corporations get away with draining them. If you have a look at satelite images of many parts of the southern US you'll see a lot of funny green circles - this is irrigation. You don't see that on satelite images of the UK, it usually rains enough that we don't need to irrigate our crops.

UK agriculture doesn't use anything like that amount of abstraction. It's not really relevant when considering the potential impact of data centres in the UK (energy costs are more worrying anyway).

The tobacco companies realised quite early on that smoking was bad. Since 1953 they knew but launched their own campaign to essentially cover up/obfuscate the health dangers. This included paying researchers to provide alternative narratives and undermine growing research showing the links between cancer and smoking.
What is really interesting is that the same "researchers" and the same PR firms would then be employed by fossil fuel companies in the 90s onwards to counteract the growing scientific consensus about carbon dioxide and global warming. And here we are.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tobacco-and-oil-industries-used-same-researchers-to-sway-public1/

Air quality in Beijing is great am I right? Coal power is so substantial as well.

Smoking was considered good for the health and help woman not be neurotic, but that idea would be tough of as crazy now.

Sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong - as I said up thread cars are killing 40,000 a year with their pollution just like cigarets were

Yes, it’s provided by WWF.

https://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/thirstycrops.pdf

I hadn't realised how much sustainability China does but the point still stands. We are paying millions for net zero but using other countries carbon etc for our stuff so we're not actually making a difference to climate change.

What jobs are created by data centres? A handful of security guards, usually. It's not a labour-intensive industry.

It is however very energy-intensive.

This is bollocks, who do you think is buying all the stuff from China (who are, btw, miles ahead of us in terms of sustainability)

Would you mind providing a citation for that?

The government says that 19% of mains water is used for non-household consumers (which will include industry and farming).
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/water-resources-2024-2025-analysis-of-the-water-industrys-annual-water-resources-performance/water-resources-2024-to-2025-analysis-of-the-water-industrys-annual-water-resources-performance

According to this government survey, 85% of farms use mains water, 31% abstract from rivers, and 25% use boreholes (there's obviously some overlap)
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/587296/fbs-wateruse-statsnotice-31jan16.pdf

Even if we assumed worst case scenarios, I'm struggling to come up with circumstances that got agricultural water use to 50% of freshwater resources, let alone 70%. Rainwater that just happens to fall on a piece of land that crops grow on doesn't count, it would have been consumed by whatever was growing there regardless.

So where do your figures come from?

At least with railways there is / was a direct connection / benefit to the local area in that residents tend to like them as they are a convenient way to travel.

Data centres are rather nebulous - you don’t know if you use / benefit from them or not.

I think the point the reporter was making was that the climate changing to a flood / drought one resets the calculations that farmers make - if lack of water threatens the harvest then improving soil quality becomes more important than previously. It’s cheaper & easier than other irrigation methods such as boreholes.

The same with pipe leaks - they’ve been talked about for years but the water companies have managed with them because Britain is a country where water shortages are rare but that is now changing.

The Guardian had a report today about golf courses and private schools still being able water lawns despite hosepipe bans - lots of complaints from the people interviewed who live near them.

@TourdeCrema actually even with railways there are still people who get quite cross at the idea of them scarring the landscape and affecting farms. Hence the expense and arguments over HS2. Plus, Victorians had a point about steam trains- they are beautiful but noisy and pollute the air and all the vegetation nearby had to be kept cut down to avoid fires. They did have a negative effect as well as a positive one.

On the other hand, there were also cranks who thought X-rays were harmful when everyone else was having fun with it back in 1896. https://daily.jstor.org/the-x-ray-craze-of-1896/

And health fanatics who got it in their heads that making phosphorus matches could make the workers ill

And add to that all the technology adjacent bandwagons that people got very excited by ("science" proving ghosts were real) that weren't harmful but also weren't the life changing breakthroughs people thought at the time either.

There's a certain amount of survivorship bias going on when we look at railways. Plus, while useful, they were a massive speculation bubble that crashed.

(X-rays are interesting because they were a genuinely useful technology that had huge benefits for medicine even today. It wasn't a fad. But went they were discovered people didn't really know what they would be most useful for and went overboard as a result. We only really need X-ray machines in hospitals and laboratories.)

i think AI is quite sinister

The same was thought about the railways as they were being built

Landowners argued that locomotive smoke would poison crops, while the noise and vibration would terrify livestock, causing cows to abort pregnancies or stop producing milk

Medical and public skepticism included beliefs that rapid movement would cause brain damage, mental derangement, or asphyxiation in open or poorly ventilated carriages.

Aristocratic protestors claimed tracks would ruin fox-hunting, poets like William Wordsworth protested the noise of steam whistles scarring the Lake District, and moralists feared cheap fares would let the working classes move about too freely.

Agree, but farmers aren't stupid. If it was easy to improve soil condition without affecting yields they would all have been doing it for years and there would be nothing to say. There is a bit of a trade of always between growing as many crops as possible in the short term and improving the soil in the long term. The calculations have changed a bit due to fertiliser rocketing in price thanks to wars. However, there is still a tension between grow as much food as possible now/make money/improve long term soil health. Those things don't always go together. The problem is government intervention to encourage/enable farmers to put long term soil health ahead of short term profits can easily be interpreted as "green madness paying farmers to not grow crops when we should be trying to be self sufficient". Putting part of the land aside for solar panels is one way (very) long term soil health can be prioritised while still providing an income to the farmer who owns the land. As you can see on this thread though it's interpreted as "taking land away from farming".

Improving soil condition is something that was mentioned on the Radio 5 condition as a measure for tackling water shortages. This was one of the easier measures as farmers can do it without government intervention.

I'm all for improving self sufficiency.
But we can't get to the point where we grow all our own food without making massive changes and sacrifices (you will eat ze bugs kind). About 50% of the food we eat is grown in the UK, but if you factor in how much we could grow without importing fertiliser that number plummets. So I don't think making the UK independent in food terms is a good goal. Ironically doing more sustainable farming that improves soil health might be better if you are worried about food security 40 years from now than trying to ramp up production in the here and now. But more warehouse storage of food rather than a just in time system could also help.

And, even more ironically, if we were to face a food blockade/shortages in a few decades time then the land which had been sitting under solar panels up till then would be more productive for growing food than the land we had concentrated on extracting maximum food from up till then. It's complicated.

Food growing in the UK is more important imo especially with climate change and flooding.

at least fields soak up water, concrete doesn’t and it’s an important part of our heritage.

we should support our farmers

governments can control populations with food shortages and having to import stuff which is probably more expensive

Would those AI jobs be physically here though or outsourced?

would the AI centre generate toxic fumes plus more concrete as opposed to to green space which soaks up rain

are all the jobs in GC necessarily minimum wage and they build skills for catering staff and managers who are local

i think AI is quite sinister