One of the world’s biggest technology companies is working on plans to power its data centres using energy generated from cow manure.
Researchers at Hewlett-Packard (HP) want to build computer warehouses on dairy farms where they would be hooked up to power plants fuelled by waste.
Just one cow produces enough waste every day to power the televisions in three typical households. A large dairy farm, with about 10,000 cows, produces enough to run one of the firm’s typical data centres and meet the energy needs of the farmer, the HP scientists believe.
If it works, the scheme could potentially solve two of the world’s looming environmental problems at a stroke.
Cow manure has long been seen as a threat because of the methane gas it produces. Methane is about 20 times more damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide. Global meat and dairy consumption is expected to soar in the next 10 years as countries such as China and India move towards a more western diet.
The amount of data stored online, meanwhile, is increasing and, to hold it, technology firms are building vast computer complexes that consume large quantities of power and generate heat. This heat can be piped away and used as an energy source.
Tom Christian, principal research scientist at HP, said: “The idea of using 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 centre and the environment.”
The HP plans were unveiled at a conference last week in Arizona. Initially, the research is focused on America, which has the biggest demand in the world for data centres as well as large-scale dairy farms.
HP believes a farmer who signed up to the scheme could earn as much as $2m (£1.4m) a year by selling waste-derived power to a data centre.
The world’s big technology firms are all working on plans to cut the environmental impact of their data centres.
Almost every item of data sent on the internet is stored in a server farm somewhere in the world. Demand for these data centres seems almost infinite.
An increasing number of data centres are being powered by solar panels and wind farms. The Icelandic government wants its tech firms to power their data centres using geothermal power.
Atlantis Power, a small Scottish firm, is building a data centre on Stroma, Orkney, that will be powered by tidal turbines generating electricity from the turbulent waters of the Pentland Firth.