HP Thinks That Cows Could Power Server Farms

While most people wouldn’t want to have anything to do with cow manure, the folks over at HP have taken a special interest in it. Why is HP busy checking out dairy cows? Turns out that they think that they could turn manure into fuel. Cow manure is full of biogas, and with the right equipment, methane can be extracted. According to some interesting calculations, the average cow makes enough waste per day to power a 100-watt light bulb, and if they had 10,000 cows, that would be enough to generate fuel for a one-megawatt data center, equivalent to a small computing center used by a bank. While the necessary equipment costs about $5m to purchase and $30,000 to run annually, enterprising farmers could still take this idea, rent out their land, and the cow-magic related to it would allow them to recoup their investment in under two-years. Will everybody be scrambling to get hold of cow manure in the future?

Matthew Chung
Categories: Computers
Tags: HP, server