Across the country, more indoor farms are launching or expanding even as others founder. This summer marked the groundbreaking of a huge vertical farming operation in Virginia by the California-based company Plenty Unlimited.
The thing is, you don’t need to reproduce the full power of the sun. All you need to produce, is the particular wavelengths of light which are absorbed best by the chlorophyll in the plants. And with modern LEDs, the power consumption is tiny.
With wind, solar, and geogermal energy production, one could theoretically power, and regulate the temp/humidity in the facility with a net 0 carbon emissions. Not a few hundred thousand gallons of gas…
Still doesn’t work out. These people are bragging that their farm uses only 600kw/hr per meter, which is still 2% of what the sun gives you for free. Even if you divide every result I got by 50 to do that conversion, you’re still using 40x more energy growing it than trucking the resulting product the entire way across the country.
That’s fine, but energy is not unlimited and probably won’t be anytime soon. I think it’s important to understand the realities of indoor farming. I find many in environmental communities like this one labor under the same misapprehensions that I found in this thread, and as a result have an unrealistically charitable outlook on them.
The thing is, you don’t need to reproduce the full power of the sun. All you need to produce, is the particular wavelengths of light which are absorbed best by the chlorophyll in the plants. And with modern LEDs, the power consumption is tiny.
With wind, solar, and geogermal energy production, one could theoretically power, and regulate the temp/humidity in the facility with a net 0 carbon emissions. Not a few hundred thousand gallons of gas…
Still doesn’t work out. These people are bragging that their farm uses only 600kw/hr per meter, which is still 2% of what the sun gives you for free. Even if you divide every result I got by 50 to do that conversion, you’re still using 40x more energy growing it than trucking the resulting product the entire way across the country.
When the energy is essentially unlimited, who cares how much energy it uses. None of that energy is burning fossil fuels.
Not mention all of the cost and resources saved on water, fertilizer, and the fact that you can grow all year round.
That’s fine, but energy is not unlimited and probably won’t be anytime soon. I think it’s important to understand the realities of indoor farming. I find many in environmental communities like this one labor under the same misapprehensions that I found in this thread, and as a result have an unrealistically charitable outlook on them.
True, but renewable energy will be essentially unlimited at some point. Where as fossil fuels will never be.
Also, we can use vertical tech in greenhouses for free sunlight. It doesn’t have to be a box warehouse.