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10,000 Cows Can Power 1,000 Servers
CWmike writes "Reducing energy consumption in data centers, particularly with the prospect of a federal carbon tax, is pushing vendors to explore an ever-growing range of ideas. HP engineers say that biogas may offer a fresh alternative energy approach for IT managers. Researchers at HP Labs presented a paper (download PDF) on using cow manure from dairy farms and cattle feedlots and other 'digested farm waste' to generate electricity to an American Society of Mechanical Engineers conference, held this week. In it, the research team calculates that 'a hypothetical farm of 10,000 dairy cows' could power a 1 MW data center — or on the order of 1,000 servers. One trend that makes the idea of turning organic waste into usable power for data centers is the moves by several firms to build facilities in rural locations, where high-speed networks allow them to take advantage of the cost advantages of such areas. But there are some practical problems, not the least of which is connecting a data center to the cows. If it does happen, the move could call for a new take on plug and play: plug and poo."
Humans in a matrix is next...
sorry, i just had to.
The IT staff is already there and at least for me personally, after some late night debugging with a pretty poor diet I have produced some ... Um.... "energy rich by-products"
Monstar L
... Bullshit!
the constant contridictions made by the global warming crowd hurts my head. methane was a bad gas last week?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
That's backwards! Surely it's more poo and plug...
Anyway, how many cow's worth is it going to take to cart around all these tonnes of shit to the nearest power plant?
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
I wonder how hard is to create a closed artificial environment with cows, plants that feed them. All powered with sun for the plants and manure for everything else; including the robots that manage everything.
Then I wonder if cows and their food can live in space.
Its funny, as in India its being used as a fuel since decades in rural areas. Now companies can outsource this too ;)
Are we not just removing more from the earth. I though the poo adds nutrients back into the earth. It allows plants to grow, in the form of compost.
If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
Sound's like the music-industry...
Giving "Powered by shit" a new dimension and meaning :)
So this is what "This APT has Super Cow Powers" was about all along!
To sell this they would have to not focus on the huge waste cows and the cattle industry put into the environment. I would recommend they just sell it on some economic benefits to farmers. If it is sold as a method that utilizes some of the massive waste dairy imparts on the environment, it'll get killed by farmer lobby groups faster than you can say Methane Tax.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
looks like a good start for our greenie environment! Otherwise, if we can make that "smell-less", that will be a great invention.
Wouldn't it be more economical to simply directly use the energy that otherwise would have been used to raise the cattle in the first place, i.e. growing, harvesting and transporting the feed?
That's great news! I have 5 cows so I'll be hooking them up to my server ASAP!
... and not one Dell joke?
I guess she's a ten cow server
cant wait for shmoo con
...is this?
Seriously. Every time I see such stupid headlines, I cringe (and that's quite often these days, that's why I'm becoming ever grumpier).
10000 cows => 1MW. OK. That's all we need to know.
Besides, they're allotting 1KW per server. Power hungry, those HP servers, ain't they?
How much energy is required to collect the waste and move it to the burning facility? Also, how much methane and CO2 is emitted when the energy is extracted from the waste? The calculation needs to take the entire system into account, not just the cost of the electricity.
Holy cow... that was bullshit???
As I remember there is already a site that can power a sever with Tucows. What was its name again?
and if we use to render the next Avatar movie the cycle is complete.
Now all anyone needs is a former engineer to run it, and a big dumb guy to be his muscle and we're all set for the future.
... because only apt has super cow powers.
The most abundant energy source in history! You, sir, deserve a Nobel Prize.
That's what this seems to rely on: The conversion of methane (CH4) to CO2 by combustion. Is CH4 a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2? I seem to remember it is, but I'm not sure.
"Absorbing your worst..."
I would just like to say
There is no cow level
Bullshit, eh? I'd hate to drink some of the "milk" from this dairy farm.
...here in Germany and Austria, where a lot of larger farms invested into a biogas plant; they sell the electric power they generate to the national grid, at slightly preferential rates. One large farm, my last client, runs a 500 kW plant, without anyone making a fuss or being amazed about it.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Boole shit.
Haven't got a cow, man.
How many flops is that?
Is that a real server farmer in the Dell?
One trend that makes the idea of turning organic waste into usable power for data centers is the moves by several firms to build facilities in rural locations, where high-speed networks allow them to take advantage of the cost advantages of such areas.
An example of this trend is the world's largest, the Lakeside Technology Center (sounds rural enough) located ... in downtown Chicago.
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/special-report-the-worlds-largest-data-centers/worlds-largest-data-center-350-e-cermak/
See that that USB meat grinder wasn't a waste of money....
If you don't like my sig then don't read it.
So if I want a frickin' steak I have to sacrifice a server? Easy decision - yummmm!
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
If 10,000 cows can produce 1 megawatt of power, which is 1,314 horsepower, surely it would be more efficient to use the output of 1,314 horses running on treadmills instead? That's about 1 horse to 7.5 cows, meaning big savings on space which is great for a data-centre. Even greater efficiencies could be had if the waste from the horses was used in the manner intended for the cow waste.
Don't even think about using hamsters in wheels though, because they'll only generate a useful 1/2072 horsepower each, which means you need about 2.7 million hamsters to generate 1 MW. I think the overhead of cage and wheel cleaning would become prohibitive at that point.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
just says it all.
If you decided to use horses, you would have to make a setup to move horses on treadmill. Horses which sit all day, will eat extra food.
Now with cows, all this poo is anyways going to be there. Cows give milk, thats the main product. Its just that the waste also is being put to use.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
ide hate to be the guy milking them sounds like a job for mike rowe
We won't listen to any logic and reason here! No, sir! Who do you think we are!? Where do you think this is!? What you speak of is madness, sir.
Consolidating a physical server-farm to tens or hundreds of virtual linux servers running on an IBM mainframe under z/VM can significantly reduce power needs.
Using cows to create power is certainly clever but wouldn't it be more efficient to reduce the power requirements to begin with? Using the cows seems to me to be putting your efforts at the wrong end of the pipe, so to speak.
I suggest this from hands on experience in a z/Linux environment.
Of course this may not be the solution for everyone but I note that most of the outside "knowledge" about this tends to be a lot of self-serving marketing mis-direction. You know, "treat them like mushrooms..."
Physical server-farms? How quaint...
Cowbuntu.
until animal supporters say it should be the cows choice if its manure is used to generate power..
http://snappeh.com/blog/ - My Blog, not that any of you care...
One bull can serve 10,000 cows ;-O
Cows have magnets in their first stomach - farmers and ranchers throw them in there so that any metal the inadvertently swallow won't go any further and will get barfed up with the magnet.
Just put big coils of wire out in the fields or the dairy barns and have the cows constantly walking through them (in the same direction - that's the tricky part) and generate electricity.
Except you can still use the cows for meat/dairy while using their shit to produce electricity.
and the shit can still be spread onto a field after it has been depleted of methane. so really you are not dedicating 390 square miles to running a bunch of servers
"HP engineers say that biogas may offer a fresh alternative energy approach for IT managers. Researchers at HP Labs presented a paper (download PDF) on using cow manure from dairy farms and cattle feedlots and other 'digested farm waste' to generate electricity..."
Not really so fresh after all then...
The state of Vermont has had its Cow Power program available in production for a few years now. The primary power company in the state, Central Vermont Public Service, has been driving the expansion of this alternative energy. To my understanding the primary problem is that there is far more demand from CVPS subscribers for this form of energy then there currently are producers. The bottom line however is that this type of energy is in a broad-use production, feeding the power grid in Vermont...
Maybe this could become the new unit by which we measure the power consumption of computers. Like my laptop requires 10 cowpower - why not, they use horsepower for cars :)
"An idea sketched out by a [HP] research team?" At least the reporter corrected HP's claim to innovation. In fact, here in VT, CVPS has been doing this for years...
Guitierrez: So... graphite bars charged with negative ions. That is your weakness, eh? Freakazoid: That, or poo gas. Guitierrez: You know, it's a funny thing. Nobody likes poo gas, my friend. Blagh!
Balderdash!
To use a common Australian term - shitloads of energy. However since it's very easy stuff to move you get several shitloads of energy back per load of shit especially if you can get gravity to do a lot of the work for you.
As for methane - that's your fuel so almost nothing is released. As for carbon dioxide - not much since methane doesn't have much carbon and you get far more energy per unit of carbon than longer chains of hydrocarbon.
In fact this is all so easy that many sewerage treatment plants have been burning methane for power for decades, not to mention a lot of the stuff was used in WWII. As a primary source of power huge hydro and coal plants are of course a lot cheaper but methane has been cheap enough to use in specific circumstances for a very long time.
There's not much better for "green" credentials than methane - even the coal industry is busy chasing environmental funding with coal bed methane since less CO2 is released per Watt that way than just about everything (only about twice the CO2 per Watt of a theoretically perfect nuke plant that has never been built yet - nukes run off processed rocks too guys which means NOTHING has zero emissions).
The biggest problem is the soil depletion from removing the cow's fertilizer production from the field.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The power company here has been using cow power for years http://cvps.com/cowpower/
....no, it isn't the first day in April.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Beside that, bio-energy does not count the CO needed for stuffing the animal with food, so you might to count all the chemicals, fuel and machinery a farmer will use to grow that animal into account.
Given those unreliableness, you would have to have a long time backup energy for that (like it would take time to get new, uninfected animals in case of an disease).
That given in account I would'nt go for poo-energy and stay with an alternative mix of green energy.
Hey green fruitcakes.... the cost of that is prohibitive, or it would already be done. And note, when I say "cost", I mean cost to the environment as well. Specialized equipment, transportation, etc. 1000 servers is a drop in the bucket and 10,000 cows is a LOT of cows. Calculate the numbers of dairy farms, the number of cows required to support them, then all of the additional impact on th environment of what you are trying to accomplish.
Same goes for "old" solar power. Large investment in natural resources and effort for little bitty return. The way to make it better is to improve the EFFICIENCY of solar and wind, such that it actually makes sense. If your dire predictions of fossil fuel shortages come true, that cost-benefit ratio will invert naturally. relax.
If you are full of cow-poo, then it will not.
Personally, I think the advances will arrive before the price inverts, but I'm an optimist. Unfortunately, you are an ignorant and irrational "chicken little" who is actually counterproductive to reasonable discussion.
I, for one, would like to welcome our new cow overlords.
Could something like this be done with human waste? If you have an office complex with several bathrooms, it seems like it would be more efficient to either have the plumbing go straight to the processing area (or to have a fan sucking out all the gas), than to hire people to shovel it into a truck and drive it to the center. (Of course there may not be enough employees to power all the servers, but it still seems more efficient than the alternative)
Wouldn't it be more economical to simply directly use the energy that otherwise would have been used to raise the cattle in the first place, i.e. growing, harvesting and transporting the feed?
Yes, but we'd have to give up sausage pizza, cheeseburgers, steak burritos, and the other sustenance that is required for proper server maintenance.
I'm afraid there'll be a lot of shitty outages.
oil/gas -> fertilizer -> grass/grain -> cow
This is really just a crap way of running a Diesel generator.
Deleted
... this gives a new meaning to server farm!
Poor cows. Do you want to feed them with coal you insensitive clod?
No, silly, we'd feed them with grass and/or grain grown with fertilizer made with other fossil fuels. This appears to be just a way to use the energy in the BS (bovine stool) from existing dairies. If we took cows out of the loop entirely, people would have no milk to drink because apparently, soy milk is not milk.
Farmers spread the manure from their animals back on the fields as a way to maintain field fertility. They're not likely to want it shipped off and used to power a server farm, as that will just increase their chemical fertilizer costs.
Put those cows on land that also has windmills or solar, and you start to benefit from bigger efficiencies.
But what they are talking about is using manure that is already being created now that might be wasted or used inefficiently otherwise. You're going to have the dairies and feed lots anyway, why not put it all to use?
... my brother Mike should be able to support a small data centre.
Finally: a steady job!
I'll have to have a word with my intelligent designer about that, and ask why he gave me these canine teeth that look like they're designed for tearing meat apart
My intelligent designer says canine teeth were originally invented for tearing fruit apart.
It's The Meatrix.
Ha! Try outsourcing that to India!
Super cow powers!
Cow manure is obviously produced from plants that have been grown using fertilizer to provide - amongst others - phosphorus. Since we're rapidly running out of phosphate, I think it's an absolutely brilliant plan to burn it.
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/33164
0x or or snor perron?!
I have read about some Manure digester projects in MN, that allowed farmers to make a bit more selling electricity thank milk.
http://www.mnproject.org/e-biogaslinks.html - not the article but had some interesting reading.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
I, for one, hate our new cow fart powered future. :(
I miss Hugo Gernsback.
I was told that coal is not a replacement for oil
If nonrenewable energy sources such as coal and oil are deprecated, then what renewable energy source do you recommend to provide power on calm nights?
It may be called manure, but cow-shit is in quite high demand as it is.
This is kinda like saying we could burn the cows themselves instead of eating them (not that I do, vegan and all).
So, cow-shit=manure=fertilizer.
Burning it up is idiotic in comparison.
borg cows
We're obviously not using the cows correctly. There are 4 connectors per cow.
Oh, wait, that's milk. What are we going to do with that?
Insert
echo 'bit bucket" |sed s/bi/shi/
Wouldn't it be easier to just burn grain instead? You can use a shovel to toss grain into a boiler. A pitchfork isn't sturdy enough to toss cows in, unless you chop them into smaller bits first. And with the burnt offerings, you could end up accidently summoning assorted Gods by accident, especially when someone says "god damn it" at just the wrong time. Something like this is probably what gave Lovecraft the ideas for his books. Cows should be left where they belong, between two slices of bread with tomatoes, onions, lettuce, pickles, and assorted sauces.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
In that case, I was told that only a fool thinks moonshine is the answer, at least with current biofuel technology.
This is another one of those schemes whereby you take a waste product with zero value (and zero cost) and use it for something productive. Sounds exciting because you are getting something for nothing. Two examples of this kind of thinking come immediately to mind, with the first being biodiesel from waste restaurant oil. The second from a bit further back in history is bird guano.
Bird guano was originally viewed as just a nuisance - a substance without purpose. Only it is rich in potassium which is needed for gunpowder and other explosives. Oddly and for no apparent reason when this was discovered all sorts of people came forth trying to actively sell this former nuisance substance. Entire companies were formed to collect and process this. There is a famous movie showing the logo U.S. Guano, for example. It is worth belaboring the point that once a use was found for bird guano it became a valuable commodity. The price didn't stay at zero for very long.
Similarly today with waste restaurant oil. Today, fast food restaurants pay special waste haulers to take their used vegetable oil away. Should conversion to biodiesel be practical on a large scale this waste product will suddenly become quite valuable and restaurants will no longer give it away. This pretty much destroys the "economics of free" touted by many biodiesel supporters. It works as long as there is no market - as soon as there is a market for it, it won't be free any longer and will be priced according to its new value. This will be a significant hurdle for biodiesel production and probably is one reason why it hasn't gone anywhere but small-time individual production.
So while today animal manure is often considered a waste product with zero value the moment this changes you can expect it to be priced in accordance with its new value. This means that even a small pilot plant that was getting free manure will have to start paying for it, likely drastically changing the economics of using manure.
This is the sort of thing that looks great on the surface and can even work in a very isolated small-scale implementation. If a bunch of data centers started having digesters, methane extractors and generating systems put in place to run off manure it would quickly become far more costly than being grid-tied. It isn't even that it doesn't scale - it is that you are counting on a temporary economic condition which is assured to be very temporary.
This was predicted in Road Warrior where the town ran off methane from Pig crap. Of course there was a midget running the place with a giant baby as his henchman.
Thus creating the world's least efficient source of electricity. Taking solar energy to grow corn to feed cows to produce dung to run a furnace to boil water to move turbines to create electricity. With an efficiency of .00000001%. This sounds like the worlds best way to waste resources.
My numbers are wildly out of date (from the 1960s), but in India, about 700 million tons of cow dung were collected per year, about 300M tons of which were used as fuel, providing about the same heat output as 35M tons of coal. See Marvin Harris' work on the myth of the sacred cow.
MacroHard - Boning you in a big way! (TM)
The concept HP described in an academic paper is not new, and is already being built into a UK data center that has won awards for its approach. The Infinity ONE data center in East Anglia, England is working with a local farming co-op to use cow manure to power a combined heat and power (CHP) plant that will provide electricity for the data halls. The data center is already operational (using utility power) and expects to integrate the poop power sometime this year.
Didn't Mad Max and friends pioneer this?
Quack, quack.
What does he have to say about a digestive system capable of processing meat and nutritional requirements best served by meat ?
In Judeo-Christian mythology, a worldwide disaster caused a population bottleneck 1,656 years after the emergence of H. sapiens sapiens. This resulted in destruction of biomes and their replacement with new biomes, as well as several kinds of plants and fungi going extinct. Species that depended on these plants and fungi had to adapt to meat in a process called "microevolution", which even young-earthers believe in.
why worry about collection issue? All big cities have Sewage Treatment Plant right?
"Toronto Hydro Energy Services has received approval from City Council to build, own and operate a 10 MW Cogeneration Plant on a parcel of land at 7 Leslie Street. The Cogeneration Plant will utilize the biogas from the Ashbridges Bay Treatment Plant (ABTP) to produce both electricity and thermal energy."
http://www.torontohydroenergy.com/ashbridgesbay.html
pH7
Fringe science like this is just too dangerous to release on the world. The inventor of this should be locked up in that asylum Walter Bishop was in.
Uh, what does this have to do with data centers? Last time I checked people use electricity for lots of different things, and there is this cool technology called a grid that's made out of copper that allows you to move energy (in the form of electricity) to any user (within geographical limits) at nearly the speed of light.
Oh yeah, marketing BS. Forgot about that.
Yeah, and how much shit and CO2 do those 10 thousand cows generate?
Depressing.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
... Bullshit!
Precisely