Google's and Microsoft's data centers can be now powered by Cows manure. This might be strange to hear but it might be possible, says Hewlett-Packard engineers.
With the right skills, a dairy farmer could rent out land and power to technology companies and recoup an investment in the waste-to-fuel systems within two years, Hewlett-Packard engineers say in a research paper to be made public on Wednesday.
“Information technology and manure have a symbiotic relationship,” said Chandrakant D. Patel, the director of H.P.’s sustainable information technology laboratory, which wrote the report. “And having these data centers locally will give farmers a new opportunity.”
“The average cow makes enough waste per day to power a 100-watt light bulb,” said Michael Kanellos, editor in chief at Greentech Media, a research and publishing firm.
According to H.P.’s calculations, 10,000 cows could fuel a one-megawatt data center, which would be the equivalent of a small computing center used by a bank. Mr. Kanellos has tracked both the data center and green technology industries and agreed that there was some convenient overlap. Computing equipment produces a lot of heat as a waste product, and the systems needed to create biogas require heat. So, there is a virtuous cycle of sorts possible.
“The cows will never replace the hydroelectric power used by a lot of these data centers,” Mr. Kanellos said. “But there is interest in biogas, and this presents another way to make manure pay.”
Src: [nytimes.com]
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