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Cows On Treadmills Produce Clean Power For Farms

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the mooves-you-to-tears dept.

separsons writes "William Taylor, a farmer in Northern Ireland, recently developed the Livestock Power Mill, a treadmill for cows. Taylor uses the device to generate clean, renewable power for his farm. Cows are locked into a pen on top of a non-powered, inclined belt. The cows' walking turns the belt, which spins a gearbox to drive a generator. One cow can produce about two kilowatts of electricity, enough energy to power four milking machines. It may seem like a kooky idea, but Taylor could be onto something: According to his calculations, if the world's 1.3 billion cattle used treadmills for eight hours a day, they could provide six percent of the world's power!"

6 of 640 comments (clear)

  1. Food? by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Do they need to eat more?

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    1. Re:Food? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      >> Then we diesel truck the manure off and bury it in a landfill.

      Y'all ain't from around here, are ya?

    2. Re:Food? by mcmonkey · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Hint to mods: parent complaint is 'Funny' not 'Insightful'

      This is crazy: "We grow grain with petroleum based fertilizers, harvest it with diesel powered combines, diesel truck it over asphalt highways, and then feed it to cows on treadmills to make electricity."

      But is this any more sane: "We grow corn with petroleum based fertilizers, harvest it with diesel powered combines, diesel truck it over asphalt highways, and then feed it to yeast on treadmills to make ethanol to burn."

    3. Re:Food? by Rastl · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No shit. I've never seen a person with an actual handicap or disability using those scooters. Every one of them had two arms and two legs and none of them were paraplegics or quadraplegics.

      Oh, so my mother who was in end stage cancer and unable to walk more than a dozen yards doesn't qualify? She had two arms and two legs.

      I agree that a fair number of the people using them might look like they would benefit from exercise but that doesn't mean that I have any right to judge whether or not they use a scooter. Ditto with the handicap cards. I'm not qualified to decide if they're handicapped or not so I don't bother worrying about it.

  2. This is hardly new... by the_rajah · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In Lincoln's New Salem, near Springfield, Illinois, there is a reconstructed carding mill powered by a tilted tread wheel on which an ox walked to supply the power. This would have been in use around 1830.

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    "Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
  3. Re:Methane by pehrs · · Score: 5, Informative

    Methane has indeed a high global warming potential compared to CO2, however that calculation misses one important fact. And that is that methane has a rather limited limited lifetime in the atmosphere, around 12 years. After that it breaks down and to a large degree it goes back into circulation, becoming new methane eventually.

    When you burn oil you release CO2 that has a life cycle of (conservatively) tens of thousands of years.

    This means that if you kill off all cows and other methane production today you will see the methane effect start to wean after about a decade. Stop burning coal today and the effects will last longer than civilization has existed. As we are speaking of additive effects on the climate you quickly realize that you probably should be much more worried about the gases with long lifetimes and/or high GWP (CO2, HFC-23, SF6 etc) and less about those gases with short lifetimes/low GWP.