Researchers at Hewlett-Packard (HP), want to build computer warehouses on dairy farms where they would be hooked up to power plants fuelled by waste. Just one cow produces enough manure every day to power the televisions in three typical households. HP scientists believe that a large dairy farm, with about 10,000 cows, produces enough to run one of the firm’s typical data centres and meet the energy needs of the farmer.

Such a scheme could also have substantial environmental benefits on a number of fronts. The methane gas expelled from cow manure is seen as a serious environmental threat, estimated to be 20 times more damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide. Global meat and dairy consumption is expected to soar in the next 10 years as countries such as China and India move towards a more western diet. Meanwhile, the amount of data stored online is increasing and to accommodate it technology firms are building vast computer complexes that consume large quantities of power and generate heat. This heat can be piped away and used as an energy source. 

Although the idea of using waste to create energy has been around for centuries, what HP are proposing is a new symbiotic relationship between farms and the IT ecosystem that can benefit the farm, data centre and the environment. The world’s big technology farms are all working on plans to cut the environmental impact of their data centres. An increasing number of these centres are being powered by solar panels and wind farms. The Icelandic government wants its tech firms to power their data centres using geothermal power. In the UK, a small Scottish firm is building a data centre on Stroma, Orkney, that will be powered by tidal turbines generating electricity from the turbulent waters of the Pentland Firth

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