[photo from syncros]
Cows play an important role in some of my most memorable web-hosting-related experiences. Everybody loves Tucows’ squishy cows, but does anyone else remember the two lives cows they raffled off as a late-1990s ISPCON promo? And during EV1′s 2004 birthday bash, customers lined up to have their photos taken with a longhorn steer. Then-CEO Robert Marsh also hosted a 2005 Houston Rodeo gathering, at which he placed the winning bid for the Grand Champion Steer.
I thought of Robert when I read in this Business 2.0 article that some owners of California’s 1.7 million cows have installed methane digesters to turn cow poop into electricity. If he were still in the hosting business, he could build a cow-powered server farm. How Texan would that be!
But according to this fact sheet from Colorado State University, a 1,000 pound cow is only good for 26,000 BTUs of biogas per day, half of which goes back to maintaining necessary temperature within the digester. That’s 9 usable BTUs per minute, or 0.16 kilowatts. As a point of reference, it’d take 75 cows to replace AISO.Net‘s 12 KW of solar power (I read about them in ComputerWorld). I don’t think there’s room on the company’s 2,000 square foot rooftop for that big of a herd.
Speaking of AISO, I have a lot of respect for these folks. Based on stats in the ComputerWorld article, I’m guessing they’ve invested no less than $50,000 on solar powering their web hosting operations. Plenty of other technology companies, including 3PAR, Salesforce.com and Dell are going green by offsetting their CO2 emissions at a cost of $4.75 – $6.40 per ton. 3PAR, for instance, told eWeek that it plans to offset 8 million pounds – or 4,000 tons, which it can accomplish by writing TerraPass a $25,000 check. If AISO had taken the carbon credits approach, they could have offset their emissions for just $66.30.
One on hand, it’s the thought that counts, but at the same time, I feel like carbon credits offer too easy of a way out. I’m particularly uncomfortable with Dell’s math. It asks customers for a $6 donation to cover each desktop’s CO2 emissions over 3 years of usage, but it’ll take the trees planted with such funds 70 years to neutralize the emissions. That’s not exactly a balanced equation.
PS – A few other AISO fun facts: They run a VMWare-powered all-virtual infrastructure. They’ve got water-cooled air conditioners as well as an exchanger that brings in outside air when external temperatures drop below 60 degrees. And they even use solar tubes instead of light bulbs for day time lighting.
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