Cattle-Powered Computers?
Posted on | June 4, 2010 | No Comments
Cattle have been put to a variety of uses, but a new research paper suggests that they could be the key to powering the next wave of computer innovation.
“While not immediately intuitive, the idea plays on two trends: the building of computing centres in more rural locales, and dairy farmers’ efforts to deal with cattle waste by turning it into fuel,” reports Ashlee Vance of the The New York Times.
The paper, written by Hewlett-Packard engineers, says “a dairy farmer could rent out land and power to technology companies and recoup an investment in the waste-to-fuel systems within two years,” Vance writes.
Companies like Google, Yahoo! and Amazon have traditionally built their large computing centres, often called server farms, in or near large cities and industries, but the rise of higher-speed data transfer networks have opened up rural areas with plentiful land and cheaper electricity for use. “As a result,” Vance writes, “more data centres have been built in states like Washington, Texas, Iowa and Oklahoma.”
“The cows will never replace the hydroelectric power used by a lot of these data centres,” Michael Kanellos, editor-in-chief at Greentech Media, a research and publishing firm, told Vance. “But there is interest in biogas and this presents another way to make manure pay.”
HP reports 10,000 cows could fuel a one-megawatt data centre, which is roughly the equivalent of a small computing centre used by a bank.
Source: The Rural Blog
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Tags: Agriculture > biogas > computers > connectivity > cows > manure > rural > rurban > server farm
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