A team from HP Labs has shown that methane produced from cows could be used to support data centres requiring vast amounts of energy.
As data centres require ever more power to operate, they’re increasingly being located near existing power generation or cooling resources. One largely untapped source of energy, however, is the methane generated by cows on farms around the world.
If released into the atmosphere, methane is 21 times more damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide. But it can be captured and used to power electrical generators.
The HP researchers have shown that a farm of 10,000 dairy cows could generate 1MW of electricity, enough to power a typical modern data centre and still support other needs on the farm.
Heat generated by a data centre could also be used to more efficiently process the animal waste and thus increase methane production.
This symbiotic relationship would help address the dual challenge of reducing farm pollution and making data centres more environmentally sustainable, said Chandrakant Patel, HP Fellow and director of the company’s Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab.
How many farms are there that house 10,000 cows, the a large herd is only 200. This would involve much storage and collection, would the benefits outway the Carbon footprint of setting up such a scheme and transporting the gasses?
I have seen a dairy farm with more than 250,000 cows in the production herd, and something like 50,000-75,000 in the heifer herd. Methane is extremely easy to transport, and pipelines are a mature technology. The only requirement is dry methane to help eliminate corrosion internally.
The manure from 10,000 cows can power 4 MW of electrical generation via gasification and still leave enough heat to distill the water the farmers needs for his herd. All at much less cost per kW than anaerobic digestion, and the manure all goes away.
Bioten Power and Energy Group Inc
http://www.biotenpower.com
If you want 1 MWe and about 2MWt you could do that by anaerobic digestion by growing about 300 hectares of sileage.
This can be digested with the cows, and would produce the electricity you need, as well as heat that could be inverted to produce chilling.
Who mentioned anything about the cows digestive system?
Swedish biogas marches the cows into a giant blender. Watch the video on the news report here…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4373440.stm
The Chinese farm with 250,000 cows will produce 38,000MWh(4.7MWe) so 50,000 will produce 1MWe, are HP’s cows or technology 5 x more productive. Theory is great but in practice the Chinese performance sounds low, but possibly more realistic. We have 425,000 BUffalo and expect 20MWe plus 4MWe from heat recovery