Microsoft Is Building A Poop-Powered Data Center

Your next search on Bing might be powered by very natural gas. When you upload your data to a cloud service, it doesn’t go to some magical place in the sky. It goes to an energy-sucking data center. Big companies are trying to reduce their carbon center footprints, with Google acting as one of the leaders of the pack. Now Microsoft has announced that it’s building the world’s first zero carbon data center. And it’s powered by sewage. The $5.5 million "Data Plant" will be constructed in the Wyoming hills, where it will run on methane generated by people in the surrounding area. The methane will come from--you guessed it--sewage, which in this case will be broken down by specialized microorganisms. A methane-powered molten carbonate fuel cell at the Dry Creek Water Reclamation Facility in Cheyenne will keep power on at the data center, while CO2 created during...