Scientists design cow dung-powered data centre

Sunday, 12 February 2012

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By Jianggan Li | 3 June 2010

Researchers have found a way to combine dairy farm waste and the heat generated from data centres to create a sustainable ecosystem.

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The project, undertaken by a research team at HP Labs, used a farm of 10,000 dairy cows to fulfil the power requirements of a medium-sized (1-megawatt (MW)) data centre. Any additional power left is used to support other operations of the farm.

The results were presented as a paper to the ASME International Conference on Energy Sustainability, held last month in the US city of Phoenix.

An average dairy cow produces about 55 kg of solid waste each day, which adds to 20 metric tonnes annually – the weight of four adult elephants. For a medium-sized dairy farm of 10,000 cows, 200,000 metric tonnes of manure (equating to the weight of 40,000 elephants) is generated each year.

Unmanaged livestock waste can create negative environmental impact (air pollution and ground water contamination); and the methane created through anaerobic digestion of manure has proven to be 21 times more damaging than carbon dioxide, aggravating climate change.

Around 3.0 kilowatt-hours of electricity could be generated daily from the manure of one cow. Approximately 70 per cent of the energy from the methane could be used for power and cooling, sufficient to power a medium-sized data centre.

The heat generated by the data centre is channelled to increase the efficiency of anaerobic digestion of animal waste to produce methane, which can in turn be used to generate power for the data centre. According to the authors of the paper, the symbiotic relationship will resolve the waste problems of dairy farms as well as address the energy needs of modern data centres.

The whole system operates in an economically and ecologically sustainably manner.

Researchers also estimate that dairy farmers would break even in costs within the first two years of using a system like this and then earn roughly US$2 million annually in revenue from selling waste-derived power to data centre customers, based on US standards.

They believe the prevalence of dairy farms in some large countries provides a good co-location opportunity for data centres to operate in a sustainable and environmentally-friendly way.

“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,” says Tom Christian, Principal Research Scientist, Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab, HP. “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.”