debunking the power of cow manure- by Doug Mohney

Views and Opinions on Green IT (May 20 2010)

1. 

   Disposing of excess animal waste has been a seriously ugly problem in the farm industry, so it is a bit amusing -- and promising -- to see HP Labs put some serious thought into using cow manure and data centers together to generate power.  Hopefully,  we'll see some realism in version 2.0 of their humble proposal, but the first cut is long on engineering theories, short on real-world.

   HP's research, presented at the ASME International Conference on Energy Sustainability this week in Phoenix, AZ, explains how the back-end product of 10,000 dairy cows could fulfill the power requirements of a 1-megawatt (MW) data center with power left over for other uses.   So, we're talking about parking a medium-sized data center next to what HP's press release amusingly calls a "medium-sized" dairy farm in its press release. 

   I'm not a farm boy but TEN THOUSAND COWS is not a "medium-sized" anything. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has noted that the small dairy farm is shrinking, but its breakdown of herd-size uses hundreds with "1000+" being the highest breakpoint listed in a 2007 article published by the Economic Research Service.  The article describes Western farms with as many as 5,000 cows being "increasingly commonplace."  Ten thousand cows is likely to be called a "MegaFarm."

   If we ignore all those cows and the space for them to roam around for a moment, the methane-to-power process turns out to be a symbiotic relationship.  Waste heat from the data center is used to increase the breakdown of animal waste, resulting in more methane.  You take the methane and burn it in a generator ( or a Bloom Energy Server, I suppose) -- to generate power for the data center.

   The harsh truth for this study is that in order to make this work on the scale required, you either need to A) Park a data center next to a big agri-business or B) Form a manure co-op to collect and aggregate waste next to the data center.   Remember, the big "win" here is using excess heat from the data center for more methane production and cooling; this is an economies of scale play, but you start losing net energy efficiencies if you start having to truck in more manure.

   And not to be a party-pooper here, but there's also the non-trivial consideration that the agri-business involved is going to need some hefty broadband infrastructure running into the farm.  For a lot of telecommunications service providers, fiber to the barn has not been a priority, but if you've got 10,000 or more cows, I suppose there might be adequate capacity close by and pole-rights available to string it.  But the upfront costs to pull fiber might be non-trivial.

   The authors readily admit they need to go do "a detailed financial analysis" of the technologies involved for future work. Hopefully they will also examine the current and future availability of big broadband as well.

   If the economics and implementation are worked out for a practical implementation, the top 5 dairy states are California, Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, and Idaho.  Let's see HP put its faith in its research and set up a couple of data centers out on the farm.

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