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Cow Power Could Provide 3% of U.S. Electricity

earth2tech.com — a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin say that biogas made from manure could provide as much as 3 percent of America ’s electricity needs — that’s about the same amount of U.S. electricity that comes from renewables, excluding hydro and nuclear.

Bury
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  • FlyingPhotog, on 07/25/2008, -0/+5America has a hard enough time finding people to harvest fresh fruits and vegetables. Imagine the lack of volunteers to recover manure. A perfect group of workers for this would be convicts.
    • CatherineSouth, on 07/25/2008, -0/+3I agree. Sunshine, physical exercise and the constant reminder that doing naughty stuff will land you in the *****.
    • RogerStrong, on 07/26/2008, -0/+1You wouldn't be asking the average person to do it. You'd be asking the pig and cattle farmers - who are already collecting the manure - to change what they dump it into.

      There's a couple hundred thousand pigs within ten miles of where I live. You never see them - they spend their whole lives in the many long, flat barns dotting the countryside. You do smell them once in a while, especially when the manure gets taken from the storage bins and spread on the fields. All that methane shouldn't be wasted.
  • ascguy, on 07/25/2008, -0/+2Wow, a whopping three percent?
  • wonderchemist, on 07/25/2008, -0/+2"U.S. electricity that comes from renewables, excluding hydro and nuclear."

    Are they saying nuclear is renewable? Or are they excluding nuclear from total power generation figures for the 3% value?
    • RogerStrong, on 07/26/2008, -0/+1>> Are they saying nuclear is renewable?

      Effectively, sure. There's no shortage of uranium.

      Even solar cells have a 20 to 30 year lifespan.
  • MoniqueMoniCat, on 07/25/2008, -0/+53% is not much but even still why not use every method available? besides the fact that most of congress is INSANE, why are this energy answers such an "either or" issue? DRILL and do all of the above.
  • bitterscream, on 07/26/2008, -0/+13% is almost the amount of power that windmills currently produce in the US. Hydroelectric is 7%.
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