Monthly Archives: May 2010

One of my favorite topics to write about at AGA is biogas. It’s a great renewable energy source that people can tap into right now. I was just reading an article by Meredith Sorensen over at Harvest Power title “Biogas as Cinderella, Explored.” It’s an examination of David William House’s article “Biogas Is Renewable Energy’s Cinderella.”

These articles go into detail making the case that biogas should be a leading candidate for helping the U.S. and the world gain energy independence. The articles are filled with great links to other biogas stories including one to the “Biogas Production Incentive Act of 2009, whereby producers would receive a tax credit of $4.27 for every million British thermal units of produced biogas (see article in Biomass Magazine).”

A vat of liquid cow manure at the Vintage Dairy Biogas Project. The gas produced is injected into PG&E’s pipeline, where it will be shipped to a power plant in Northern California.

You can also cruise over to ecogeek.org for a good read on how Google may use “poo power” to power their data centers. That story highlights a research paper released by Hewlett Packard that states that tech companies like themselves, Google and Microsoft could benefit from a partnership with dairy farmers, using cattle waste for fuel.

According to the article, “An average cow produces enough manure to power a 100-watt light bulb and 10,000 cows could potentially power a 1-MW data center, a small computing center.  But another possible link between the farms and companies is that the biogas systems require a lot of heat to make fuel and computing equipment in data centers produce a lot of waste heat, so a loop could be created where the biogas plant powers the data center and the waste heat from the data center helps power the biogas plant.”

So yeah, big fan of biogas. It also doesn’t hurt that I can post pictures like the one accompanying this article. My kids always get a kick out of that picture.