Four thousand cows live at Lent Hill Dairy Farm in Steuben County, New York. Red barns house the herd. A very large manure pit sits nearby, along with two dome-shaped anaerobic co-digesters the size of small buildings.
The domes turn manure and local food waste into biogas, sold as renewable natural gas, or RNG. Most of that gas ends up as electricity, heat or vehicle fuel. At Lent Hill, some of it runs an on-site cryptocurrency mine instead.
Pennsylvania-based Ag-Grid Energy operates the site, which freelance climate journalist Marin Scotten calls the first of its kind in the country. The company says it recycles more than 45,000 gallons of food waste a day alongside the herd’s manure. Founder and CEO Rashi Akki wants to go further and feed small data centers near mid-sized dairies. “What we want to do is also provide, if possible through fiber optics, [the] value of the AI computing capacity to that same regional area,” she told Sentient.
The pitch arrives as data centers draw 4.9% of U.S. electricity, a share that could double by 2030.
How much could it really power?
Not much, Scotten said on KJZZ’s The Show. “It’s really unlikely that RNG, which comes from manure, would ever be used as a primary data center fuel. There’s just not enough of it.”
The appeal is more practical. Because RNG is a gas, it can drop into existing fossil fuel infrastructure such as pipelines. Some groups see it as a backup fuel, or something to blend with natural gas. In California, Microsoft has partnered with Enchanted Rock to use RNG for backup data center power. Vanguard Renewables has called it “the fuel of the AI age.”
Scotten said industry groups are promoting the idea, but nobody knows yet how much of it is actually happening. “We’re at the very beginning of that sort of being a thing,” she said.
The objection
Critics call a blended fuel a way for data centers to claim they run sustainably, and possibly earn financial credits. Scotten put the sticking point in plain terms: digesters were already accused of rewarding farmers for making as much manure as possible. Government subsidies and RNG sales can make the waste worth more than the milk. Some people, she said, call it “the gold rush for manure.”
A new market in data centers would widen that opening, critics say, and could push herds larger and tie the country more tightly to factory farming. Biogas backers, a coalition of agriculture, fossil fuel, utility and waste management interests, argue the opposite: that it puts waste to use. Whether the fuel counts as clean depends on whom you ask, Scotten said. Some say RNG is never clean. Others say it beats conventional natural gas.
Scotten described the industrial-scale problem this way. A digester will not appear on a small family farm; these are operations with herds of 4,000 or more. Manure from an operation that size is stored in lagoons or spread on fields, and in that quantity it can contaminate groundwater and raise public health concerns.
What drew her to the story, she said, was the lineup of interests: agriculture, fossil fuels, energy, utilities, recycling and the waste haulers trucking food scraps to the farms.
Sources
- Idea of cow manure to power data centers is convergence of powerful industries, journalist says
- Is Cow Manure the Next Data Center Fuel?
