How Many Cowpower is That? 46
Zlorfik writes: " Accoring to a a Des Moines Register story, a new facility in Iowa can generate enough renewable energy from 700 cows to power 1,000 100-watt bulbs." This sounds like a good reason to switch to a slightly more efficient lighting system.
India (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Bad Pun (OFFTOPIC) (Score:1)
In 1973 I won a radio contest for making up the best fractured version of a song title.
The Song Title: The Endless Enigma (ELP)
Fractured Song Title: The Endless Enema
Re:I'm confused... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I'm confused... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:PWEEEEF (Score:1)
Irony (Score:1)
That's great and all... (Score:1)
But can it power 1 100,000-watt bulb?
Possibilities (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Possibilities (Score:3, Informative)
CH4 (methane) + 2 02 (oxygen) -> 2 H2O (water) + CO2
But, considering that the greenhouse effect of methane is much larger than that of CO2, this is not a problem.
On a related note, many gasses have an effect on the greenhouse phenomenon. CO2 is the most famous one because it's the one that varies the most, and the one that (according to most scientists) has an increasing concentration due to human activities.
Re:Possibilities (Score:2)
#include NaCl
if the methane was going to be created anyway (because the cattle were pre-existing for human consumption) this at least reduces the pollutants to a less harmful pollutant, like a catalitic (sp) converter. also, since the cows get fuel from grass which gets its fuel from CO2 and H2O we're closing the loop.
Methane (Score:2)
Few of them are new, either (Score:2)
Oddly, despite all the interest I've seen in composting toilets in various back-to-the-land magazines I cannot recall seeing one which is designed to produce methane as a byproduct. Maybe there is some liability issue, such as somebody would be certain to run a leaky gas-line indoors and poison themselves without the ethyl mercaptan additive to give the gas a strong warning smell.
Landfills also produce quite a bit of methane, which is burned off in most places. There are some projects going to convert this free fuel to useful energy; I don't have a URL handy but I've read a somewhat tedious PDF of a white paper about the power potential of a certain landfill (King county, WA I think) and how cost-effectively it could be harnessed. Food for thought.
Re:Few of them are new, either (Score:1)
Re:Possibilities (Score:2, Informative)
Additionally, methane is much less stable than CO2 in the atmosphere. I forget the pricise figures, but I think the residence time for your average methane molecule is 1-2 years. Depending on your ocean uptake numbers, CO2 residence is in the 100's of years.
Re:Possibilities (Score:2)
Don't forget that just about all the carbon processed by the cow is originally from agricultural products, and that all the carbon in agricultural products is originally atmospheric. So in that sense it's a closed cycle which doesn't emit any excess CO2 (*).
(*) This ignores CO2 from fossil fuels used by agricultural machinery and fertilizer production.
7 cows per kilo-watt (Score:1)
I can generate electricity rubbing a balloon
on my head, but is it economically feasable?
probably not.
And how many cows would you have otherwise? (Score:2)
obDidn'tRTFA (Score:3, Funny)
But aren't cows more expensive to burn than coal or oil?
--
Evan (no references in this message)
Re:obDidn'tRTFA (Score:1)
Re:obDidn'tRTFA (Score:1)
One Mouse power (Score:3, Interesting)
We never found the need to use any bigger animals.
Renewable Energy (Score:1)
Well, the article link seems out, so how about a little reference material on biomass for energy generation: Iowa Renewable Energy Resource Guide - Biomass [state.ia.us] and from the same site Methane Recovery [state.ia.us].
Since I can't find the article to read it (broken link as I post), I can't say definitively, but from the above site, it appears methane has been used for energy generation in Iowa since 1972. So this would appear to be nothing new, even for Iowa. Not to poo poo the post or anything.
The Matrix (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The Matrix (Score:2)
"There are fields, endless fields, where human beings are no longer born, we are grown."
Female animals in factory farms are kept in an almost perpetual state of pregnancy to satisfy our demands for meat.
"I watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living."
Better than grinding up the dead and mixing it with the food for the living, like we do with livestock (though not so much anymore, thanks to BSE).
"... in order to change a human being into this (holds up battery)"
Or to turn a cow into a Happy Meal. And we don't even give them a fantasy world to keep their mind off what's happening.
Just some 'food' for thought....
Cows in the news (Score:3, Funny)
Damn Iowa (Score:1)
How about some more reading material? (Score:1)
Either way, if you really want to spend hours digging through all manner of excellent research and papers on alternate fuels, feel free to peruse the US Department of Energy's Alternative Fuels Data Centre [doe.gov].
How exactly... (Score:1)
On a somewhat similar subject (Score:2)
(moo.)
Re:On a somewhat similar subject (Score:1)