[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.
This is a fun look at some important issues. We're number crunchers ourselves at TerraPass, so one thing to point out:
The electricity generation from burning cow methane is a benefit of these projects, but not the main one. Methane is a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than CO2, and burning it removes it from the atmosphere. This won't help power a server, but it will help balance the emissions from powering a server.
So, no, cows will never be a major source of renewable energy. But the flip side of this equation is unfortunately true -- cows are already a major source of greenhouse gases. Programs such as 3PAR's partnership with TerraPass help address that problem.
But of course solar panels are great, too! There's not silver bullet to climate change, and broadbased solutions are needed.
Regards,
Adam Stein
Co-founder, TerraPass
I'm a big TerraPass fan, and I think 3PAR's green initiative is awesome - particularly since their virtualized storage infrastructure already minimizes carbon emissions.
At the same time, I feel like companies like AISO aren't getting enough recognition for investing in alternative energy infrastructure and changing their way of doing business. Offsetting your emissions is a great first step, but reducing it takes much more commitment.
A while back Todd Woody at Business 2.0 had a great blog post about Salesforce.com sending out environmentally unfriendly press kits to promote its carbon neutrality. Good intentions alone aren't enough to overcome the impact of old habits.
I posted a photo of the cow giveaway with Donny from DirectNIC at : http://flickr.com/photos/syncros/392538309/
http://www.thinkhost.com/socialchange/renewable-en...
Globally, there's an awful lot of data center infrastructure already in place and while it would be nice to have solar panels and wind turbines directly powering each one of them, as you point out, it's horribly expensive at this point, somewhat wasteful of current infrastructure and is going to be some time coming.
The purchase of green tags is a great way for web hosts to do something environmentally positive right now by ensuring the equivalent power that they use is fed into a grid somewhere from renewable sources such as solar and wind. It's a big picture concept and a practice that should be encouraged rather than being seen as the poor cousin to direct renewables powering.
Imagine if every data center in the world started purchasing authentic green tags - that sort of demand would also help fund new renewable energy power generation projects over filthy coal-fired power!