Cow Power Now Available

Farmers in Vermont finally have a way of getting rid of all that cow manure and get paid for it: CowPower™! It's basically a program where generators are installed that run on methane gas produced by burning cow shit. The implications are, of course, mindboggling. Imagine, if you will, a world where your computer runs on what you did in the toilet not twenty minutes ago! A veritable fountain of crap has opened up, allowing one and all to use what was the last un-recyclable waste for electricity generation. It's not as inefficient as you think either. Look at what one lowly farm can produce:

Blue Spruce Farm in Bridport is the first farm to provide energy through CVPS Cow Power™. Several other farms are expected to begin Cow Power production late this year or in early 2007. Blue Spruce has 1,500 cattle, enough to produce 1.75 million kWh a year.

By comparison, a typical coal plant (500MW - costing around $500 million to build) produces 3.5 billion kWh a year. Some quick math: a cow produces 1,166k kWh a year, so to get the same power as a coal plant you need...exactly 3,000,000 cows. Not too bad, when you consider there exist a whole 150,000 cows in the entire state. Sometimes I wonder...