How Many Cowpower is That?

Zlorfik writes: " Accoring to a a Des Moines Register story, a new facility in Iowa can generate enough renewable energy from 700 cows to power 1,000 100-watt bulbs." This sounds like a good reason to switch to a slightly more efficient lighting system.

Comments

India

[Screaming Lunatic]

This has been done for years in third-world countries for a long time. Particularily in India. It's nice to see industrialized countries following suit. Especially since we don't have an endless supply of gas (pun intended).

Possibilities

[LagDemon]

This is very neat. A good way to get rid of all that cow pollution. But when they say they reduce the methane production, aren't they just converting it to CO2(this assumes i am right to this they are burning it in the generator). Also, why stop with only cow manure? There are 6 billion people on this planet, which must translate into a goodly amountof methane. And cows produce methane directly, too. Don't forget that.

Re:Possibilities

[vrt3]

I didn't read the article since the link seems to be broken, but I assume you're right:

CH4 (methane) + 2 02 (oxygen) -> 2 H2O (water) + CO2

But, considering that the greenhouse effect of methane is much larger than that of CO2, this is not a problem.

On a related note, many gasses have an effect on the greenhouse phenomenon. CO2 is the most famous one because it's the one that varies the most, and the one that (according to most scientists) has an increasing concentration due to human activities.

Re:Possibilities

[gotih]

IANAC
#include NaCl

if the methane was going to be created anyway (because the cattle were pre-existing for human consumption) this at least reduces the pollutants to a less harmful pollutant, like a catalitic (sp) converter. also, since the cows get fuel from grass which gets its fuel from CO2 and H2O we're closing the loop.

Re:Possibilities

[GodsMadClown]

As long as the cows aren't eating coal, petroleum or natural gas from a well, the carbon in their manure came from plant sources. Plants get thier carbon from the air. It's a zero-sum game. The big idea behind the problem with CO2 release is all the people releasing the carbon that was locked away deep underground as limestone (to make concrete) or fossil fuels.

Additionally, methane is much less stable than CO2 in the atmosphere. I forget the pricise figures, but I think the residence time for your average methane molecule is 1-2 years. Depending on your ocean uptake numbers, CO2 residence is in the 100's of years.

Re:Possibilities

[Guppy]

This is very neat. A good way to get rid of all that cow pollution. But when they say they reduce the methane production, aren't they just converting it to CO2(this assumes i am right to this they are burning it in the generator).

Don't forget that just about all the carbon processed by the cow is originally from agricultural products, and that all the carbon in agricultural products is originally atmospheric. So in that sense it's a closed cycle which doesn't emit any excess CO2 (*).

(*) This ignores CO2 from fossil fuels used by agricultural machinery and fertilizer production.

Re:I'm confused...

[NoKnack]

I think the power supply would be continuous, barring any brownouts or other power interruptions. It would be pretty inefficient if they had to wait for more manure every time they wanted more power. As for why the light bulbs, that's probably since for most people, it's easier to picture 1000 100-watt light bulbs than actually figure out what 100kW is useful for.

Re:I'm confused...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Brownouts." Heh. Heh.

obDidn'tRTFA

[JabberWokky]

.
But aren't cows more expensive to burn than coal or oil?

--
Evan (no references in this message)

One Mouse power

[brejc8]

Or you can use one mouse to power an asynchronous microprocessor.
We never found the need to use any bigger animals.

The Matrix

[Adrian Voinea]

This sound like The Matrix... for cows ;)

Re:The Matrix

[ShavenYak]

The parallels between The Matrix and modern farming are intriguing:

"There are fields, endless fields, where human beings are no longer born, we are grown."
Female animals in factory farms are kept in an almost perpetual state of pregnancy to satisfy our demands for meat.

"I watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living."
Better than grinding up the dead and mixing it with the food for the living, like we do with livestock (though not so much anymore, thanks to BSE).

"... in order to change a human being into this (holds up battery)"
Or to turn a cow into a Happy Meal. And we don't even give them a fantasy world to keep their mind off what's happening.

Just some 'food' for thought....

Cows in the news

[n-baxley]

In an unsuccessful attempt to find the real story link, I searched the Des Moines Register for "cow power". I ended up with over 50 hits. Not many news sites can say that!

Few of them are new, either

[Spamalamadingdong]

As others have noted, what's remarkable is that anyone thinks this is new. "Gobar gas" generators have been around for a quarter century or so, and the occasional sewage-plant worker has converted engines or whole vehicles (such as their personal cars) to run off of gas emitted by the decaying organic matter. That does include human waste, BTW...

Oddly, despite all the interest I've seen in composting toilets in various back-to-the-land magazines I cannot recall seeing one which is designed to produce methane as a byproduct. Maybe there is some liability issue, such as somebody would be certain to run a leaky gas-line indoors and poison themselves without the ethyl mercaptan additive to give the gas a strong warning smell.

Landfills also produce quite a bit of methane, which is burned off in most places. There are some projects going to convert this free fuel to useful energy; I don't have a URL handy but I've read a somewhat tedious PDF of a white paper about the power potential of a certain landfill (King county, WA I think) and how cost-effectively it could be harnessed. Food for thought.

And how many cows would you have otherwise?

[Spamalamadingdong]

It's not economically feasible to run a french-fry operation for the waste-oil fuel, but since you're throwing away the spent fryer oil anyway it is cost-effective to burn it in an engine. The same thing with cow flop.

On a somewhat similar subject

[AnalogBoy]

What *IS* the deal with geeks and cows? They're not exactly intelligent, graceful creatures, and they're not even that nice looking. I mean, compare a cow to, say, a nice white horse.

(moo.)

Methane

[geoswan]

Bogs, piles of manure, improperly aerated compost piles generate methane. It is a byproduct of anaerobic bacteria. Since it is a more potent greenhouse gas it would be in our interests to aerate bogs, manure piles, and compost piles. Global warming will speed up the biological activity in said bogs, etc.