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Proposal for dairy cows to power computer data centers

Click here to see a video of HP Labs' Chandrakant Patel explaining the research

IT manufacturer Hewlett-Packard has put forward a new study proposing computer data centers run on energy generated from cow manure.

The company’s central research arm, HP Labs, put forward proposals for power-hungry data centers to be located close to dairy farms to make use of renewable energy generated from waste output.

The study suggested that a one-megawatt data center, seen as a medium-sized data center, could be powered by an anaerobic digestion facility using the manure from 10,000 dairy cows.

Anaerobic digestion involves organic material being liquidized and fed to microbacteria, which generate methane-rich biogas and fertilizer as byproducts. The biogas can then be used to generate electricity.

The HP Labs proposal suggests that the heat produced by the computer processors within a data center could be used in the anaerobic digestion facility that generates power for the data center.

“Symbiotic relationship”

The research stated that the needs and challenges of both parts of the symbiotic relationship could be aligned to create a “sustainable life cycle” using technology already available.

Tom Christian, principal research scientist for HP’s Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab, said: “The idea of using animal waste to generate energy has been around for centuries, with manure being used every day in remote villages to generate heat for cooking. The new idea that we are presenting in this research is to create a symbiotic relationship between farms and the IT ecosystem that can benefit the farm, the data center and the environment.”

HP said the average cow produces enough manure in one day to generate three kilowatt-hours of electrical energy, enough to power TVs in three average US homes for a day.

The company said dairy farmers could recoup their costs within the first two years of using a biogas system with a data center partner, and then earn around $2 million a year selling waste-derived electricity.

Increasingly powerful computer data centers are being increasingly co-located close to their power supply in order to cut operational costs and protect against utility grid power losses.

HP said the availability of dairy farms in the United states presented such a co-location opportunity.