Researchers at technology giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) are hoping to come up with a way of creating power from dairy farms, specifically from the waste from cows.

In theory, a single cow creates enough waste every day to power the televisions in three households. A fairly large dairy farm will have around 10,000 cows and HP believes that this many cows would be able to power one of their data centres.

If HP could find a way to power homes and businesses from cow waste, it would mean helping to reduce two problems in one swoop. The first issue is that cow manure is a threat to the environment because of the methane they produce. Methane is said to be 20 times more damaging than carbon dioxide to the environment and with meat and dairy consumption due to grow significantly over the next decade, there are big concerns in this area.

Meanhile, the amount of data we store online is increasing. And with this, technology firms are increasing the size of their data centres, increasing the amount of power required.

HP scientists have pointed out that their ideas are not new. In fact, manure is used in remote villages to generate heat for cooking. HP are just hoping to produce a larger scale, more high-tech version of this.

HP have said that they believe a farmer who signed up to the scheme could earn as much as $2m a year by selling waste-derived power to a data centre.

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