HP to use manure for datacenter

By siliconindia   |   Friday, 21 May 2010, 17:30 IST   |    1 Comments
Printer Print Email Email
New Delhi: HP Labs found a research through which the manure output of cows and the heat output of data centers can be combined to create an economically and environmentally sustainable operation. It explains how a farm of 10,000 dairy cows could fulfill the power requirements of a 1-megawatt (MW) data center. This equals to the medium sized data center with power left over to sustain other requirements of the farm. It was presented at the ASME International Conference on Energy Sustainability. It is an ability to produce a substantial IT ecosystem. The heat produced by the data center can be utilized to increase the efficiency of the anaerobic digestion of animal waste. About 70 percent of the energy in the methane produced via anaerobic digestion could be used for data center power and cooling. "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." said Tom Christian, principal research scientist, Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab, HP. The manure that one dairy cow yields in one day can make 3.0 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electrical energy, which is enough to power television usage in three U.S. households per day. According to the estimated research of HP within two years of using a system like this the dairy farmers would break even costs and earn roughly $2 million annually in revenue from selling waste-derived power to data center customers.