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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."
Then I wonder if cows and their food can live in space.
They already do. What you mean is "how much smaller can you make a spaceship in which cows & their food are living".
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?
So how do you say "I, for one, welcome our bovine overlords" in German? ;-)
I've long wondered about the short-sightedness of modern farming practices where farmers need to buy both seeds and fertilizer each year to produce a crop, when once upon a time in the not-to-distant past, both were free, and in the present, the abundance of animal waste has become an environmental problem.
I mention that because I've read stories of other countries doing what you're doing in German and Austria. In the Netherlands, for example, I've read of manufacturers that operate in such a way that the waste and by-products of both farms and factory are integrated in a near-closed loop not only with respect to materials, but also energy production.
The conclusions from these case studies is that location is key. While that may be true, I'm left wondering why, if location is so important, shipping by rail isn't just as cost effective? Certainly it's good to have things close, but the city of Chicago was built around the processing of cattle that were shipped from other parts of the country directly to "factory" spurs, and the finished "product" distributed from. If shipping by rail is cheap enough for cows (and similarly cheap for coal, oil, corn, water, among any number of other products), why wouldn't it be cheap enough for cow (or any other kind of animal) waste?
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).
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.
Ok given our current cow-poo management policies, it seems like it would make sense to get electricity from it, but if people we to stop eating cows, drinking, milk, dedicating land to cows, the land and water that is used for raising cattle (and growing grain to feel the cattle), could be used much more effectively.
Our current manure management policies are to improve digestive efficiency of the feed given to livestock, thus decreasing the quantity of manure produced, and then to use the manure as a source of fertilizer to grow more feed. What exactly is wrong with that. Farms were "Green" before being green was cool. Furthermore, you obviously have no idea as to how much surplus food is generated in the country. A large portion of the US grain production is in fact exported. I've always seen that as evidence that we are using the land very effectively. We can feed the entire US population along with a significant portion of the rest of the world. There is a reason that the Midwestern US is referred to as the "World's Bread Basket".
Of course given that we are engaged in this wasteful misuse/abuse of animals, I don't see anything wrong with using the poop.
I'll start by asking you a question. How many farms have you visited? How many animals have you personally seen abused (and I tend to discount PETA & HSUS's video's seeing as they are not above abusing the animals themselves, or creatively editing the videos to make things appear worse than they are). I have personally worked on half a dozen dairy farms, and visited at least 15 others. Routinely abused animals produce less milk, and thus are unprofitable. Anyone routinely abusing animals goes out of business in very short order. Hell even the most efficient farms spend months and occasionally years at a time selling milk at a loss because bulk milk prices drop below production costs. In the swine industry (where I work now) they just got off of a run of ~18 months of hog prices being below production prices due to increased input costs for feed (ethanol has more than doubled corn prices) and fuel and reduced demand (swine flu, which is not actually a risk but fear is irrational).
As for the original article:
I think this is an excellent idea. It could be used as an incentive for ISPs to offer higher bandwidth connections to rural areas, where many are still stuck with dial-up. It benefits the farmer because he can get higher speed connections for data transfer (many proposed animal tracking programs require a lot of data be sent in for tracking purposes fairly quickly), they also get money from the server farm for the electricity generated. The farm gets a rural location (potentially more secure), potentially cheaper electricity, cheaper land costs and taxes. The local community gets access to higher technology, and potentially higher paying jobs. Workers at the facility get the benefits of lower cost of living. It's potentially a win-win-win-win situation, assuming that the efficiency of electricity generation and facility construction costs work out.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde