If you’re a data center operator, chances are you haven’t given much thought to anaerobic digestion.

 

But some researchers from HP’s Sustainable IT Ecosystem lab have. They believes that the methane produced by a cow’s digestive process could be used to power data centers.

 

The average dairy cow produces about 20 tonnes of dung per year, which is a lot of BS, but it could also translate into 3kWh of electrical energy per day per cow.

 

In a paper called “Design of Farm Waste-Driven Supply Side Infrastructure for Data Centers”, presented at the ASME International Conference on Energy Sustainability,  they say a mid-sized US dairy farm with 10,000 cows could power a 1 MW data center.

 

“There are two ways of producing power from manure: you can burn it and use the heat to produce steam, which in turn can be used to spin turbines, or you can use an anaerobic digestion process to produce a biogas containing 60% to 70% methane,” the paper says.

 

The idea is to build an anaerobic digester to process the cow manure. The energy created can power data center servers, storage and cooling, and the heat can be drive the turbine in the chiller for the data center's HVAC system, says the GreenBiz blog.

 

It adds: “Waste-to-energy provides a reliable and steady source of energy in ways that solar and wind are not able to achieve, and with 21 times the heat-trapping potential of carbon dioxide, generating energy from the huge clouds of methane that would otherwise warm the atmosphere is a classic twofer.”
 

Cullen Bash, a member of the HP research team, said all of the elements required to develop the system were available.