[HN Gopher] Vertical farming does not save space
___________________________________________________________________
Vertical farming does not save space
Author : oftenwrong
Score : 142 points
Date : 2021-02-18 19:30 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lowtechmagazine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lowtechmagazine.com)
| betwixthewires wrote:
| *using solar as a power source.
|
| I wish they'd include those important parts in the title.
| villasv wrote:
| Vertical Farming saves space at the expense of electricity. I
| think the argument against them has to be along the lines of this
| trade-off >>possibly<< being a net negative for the environment.
|
| No one cares if the net result is using more space if this means
| farms closer to the city and larger solar farms far away.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >No one cares if the net result is using more space if this
| means farms closer to the city and larger solar farms far away.
|
| Solar energy is highly diffuse, so you need huge swaths of land
| to collect it, which has detrimental impact on any ecosystem
| you place them in.
| maxharris wrote:
| _Artificial lighting saves land because plants can be grown above
| each other, but if the electricity for the lighting comes from
| solar panels, then the savings are canceled out by the land
| required to install the solar panels. The vertical farm is a
| paradox unless fossil fuels provide the energy. In that case,
| there's not much sustainable about it._
|
| This entire piece is based on the assumption that the only
| sources of energy are solar panels and fossil fuels. This is
| false. According to the US Department of Energy, 19.6% of the
| energy produced in 2019 is nuclear. In that same year, 7.1% was
| from wind, 7.0% was hydroelectric, 1.4% from biomass, 0.4%
| geothermal. Only 1.7% was photovoltaics!
| https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427
|
| If we look into the relatively near future, fusion energy is
| going to account for a rapidly increasing share of energy
| production by the end of this decade.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
| Retric wrote:
| Commercial nuclear takes up a lot of space, to the point where
| replacing it with solar is surprisingly close.
|
| For example the the Brunswick nuclear power plant in North
| Carolina, covers 1,200 acres or 4,860,000 square meters for
| 1,858 MW = 382 w/m2. It's stated lifetime capacity factor is
| 75% which is much higher than solar, but that's ignoring the
| long construction and decommissioning process afterwards.
|
| You can find both higher and lower energy density examples, but
| I personally was surprised how close they where.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| That's the whole land belonging to the site, most of which is
| nature, not the plant itself, which looks like less than 200
| acres, including the car parks.
|
| In any case, it's not close at all either for that specific
| example or in general, not least considering that a nuclear
| plant can produce 24/7 and that solar often does not reach
| peak production because of the weather.
|
| " _A solar PV facility must have an installed capacity of
| 3,300 MW and 5,400 MW to match a 1,000-MW nuclear facility's
| output, requiring between 45 and 75 square miles. For
| comparison, the District of Columbia's total land area is 68
| square miles._ " [1]
|
| [1] Nuclear Energy Institute @
| https://www.nei.org/news/2015/land-needs-for-wind-solar-
| dwar...
| tshaddox wrote:
| But surely they don't just own the "nature" land for the
| fun of it. I assume it could not be used for other things,
| like housing, or another nuclear power plant!
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| The difference with solar/wind space requirements is so
| big that it does not matter.
|
| If the land is reserved and left to nature that is still
| a positive thing because that helps the environment and
| biodiversity. But I'm sure that they could put solar
| panels on it if they wanted.
|
| The point is that this land is not required for
| production and in any case solar require much, much more
| land, so, no, it's not even close.
| Retric wrote:
| Winds density is off the charts as you can use the ground
| around it for crops or even solar panels.
| https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/wind-turbines-corn-
| fields-ae...
| tshaddox wrote:
| It doesn't really make sense to talk about land usage
| that _just so happens_ to be owned by a nuclear plant, or
| even certain _fixed_ land requirements for a nuclear
| plant. It only makes sense to talk about the _limiting
| behavior_ of land usage for various types of power
| plants.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Solar has hugely larger requirements than nuclear however
| you look at it, contrary to what was suggested above.
| Retric wrote:
| Look through several nuclear locations and ~1000 acres is
| fairly typical. In theory they could be more compact, but
| security concerns etc means nobody puts 2GW of nuclear on a
| 200 acre site.
|
| 1,000 acres, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_Valley_Nu
| clear_Power_St...
|
| 1,782-acre, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Nuclear_Gen
| erating_Stati...
|
| 2,767 acres https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callaway_Nuclear_
| Generating_St... for just 1,190 MW.
|
| Some are significantly more compact for example 391-acre
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catawba_Nuclear_Station, but
| that's surrounded by water.
| tohmasu wrote:
| You're saying that a couple of 50 year old reactors when
| including a safety zone and adjusting for lifetime capacity
| outputs about twice the maximum power of commercial solar
| panels before adjusting for capacity factor.
|
| When you adjust PV for capacity factor the difference ends up
| at over an order of magnitude.
| kempbellt wrote:
| Thought: Put PV inside the "safety zone" to increase output
| and use "unusable" space.
| Retric wrote:
| You're skipping permits +construction ~10 years and
| decommissioning which seems to take 30+ years on average
| though few have actually finished the process.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning
|
| 75% capacity factor * 50y / (50y + 10y construction + ~30y
| decommissioning) = 42% capacity factor which is higher than
| solar but not by that much.
|
| But let's assume you're at a 1.5x capacity factor
| advantage. So 1.5 GW of solar = 1.0 GW of nuclear. 1.5GW /
| 220w/m2 = 2.9 square miles of panels plus panel spacing and
| whatever infrastructure is needed. Double it to be really
| pessimistic and your under 6 square miles.
| nfin wrote:
| One more thing it saves:
|
| Transportation (!) from miles away, as a skyscraper could feed
| a city or a part of it.
| cbmuser wrote:
| Yeah, don't bother with reading articles that exclude the
| largest source of clean energy in US.
|
| Such articles have an ideological bias.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| They might have an ideological bias, but if the prevailing
| ideology is anti-nuclear then ignoring that bias isn't going
| to get you very far. Biden has committed us to moving the
| energy sector off of carbon in the next 15 years, which means
| we're going to build a lot of $CleanEnergy really soon, and
| if the ideological landscape doesn't change it very likely
| will be a whole lot of solar and wind (what is 15 years minus
| the amount of time it takes to build out a nuclear power
| plant?).
| brohee wrote:
| > what is 15 years minus the amount of time it takes to
| build out a nuclear power plant?
|
| If the last European projects are to be taken as models,
| it's a negative number (Olkiluoto 3 started in 2005 and not
| online before next year at best...). Not better for
| Flamanville 3, maybe Hinkley Point C will be achieved a bit
| faster...
| tomcooks wrote:
| No problem with nuclear until you have a problem, then it's a
| catastrophe
| pier25 wrote:
| Woah great video. Thanks for sharing!
| skissane wrote:
| > If we look into the relatively near future, fusion energy is
| going to account for a rapidly increasing share of energy
| production by the end of this decade.
|
| I really don't think by the end of this decade there will be
| any commercial fusion production. I'm sure we will be closer
| but it is still some decades away.
|
| ITER proposes to follow up their current research reactor with
| a successor (DEMO) which they plan to start building around
| 2040 and begin operating in the 2050s. Then they expect DEMO to
| be followed by their first commercial power station, PROTO.
| They probably won't even start building PROTO until the 2050s
| or 2060s, so we could easily be looking at 2070-2080 before it
| comes online.
|
| Now, there are other teams working on fusion, there is always
| the possibility some other team could leapfrog ITER. It is also
| possible that with increased investment timelines might come
| forward. But I'm very confident that come 2030, the amount of
| fusion power in the commercial energy markets is going to still
| be zero.
| benjaminjackman wrote:
| I don't know about commercial by 2030 but leap frogging ITER
| doesn't seem far fetched at all because of the all signficant
| advances in superconductors achieved after ITER was planned
| out. Also, if the new superconductors do work out, it's very
| likely that all other forms of energy generation and grid
| level storage will become almost immediately obsolete and any
| additional focus moving forward would be only on improving
| the efficiency of fusion. The remaining use cases for solar
| would probably then be on small off-grid type situations.
| gh02t wrote:
| I'm a nuclear engineer working at a laboratory known for
| fusion research. Commercial fusion power at any scale is
| not happening by 2030. 2040 or 2050 are more realistic and
| may still be a stretch.
| benjaminjackman wrote:
| That's interesting, do you think that SPARC and HTS
| advancements like for example VIPER cables point towards
| a faster path to market for fusion than ITER?
| tux1968 wrote:
| The other thing to remember is that there is a lot of land that
| isn't suitable for farming for one reason or another that can
| be used for solar.
| reportingsjr wrote:
| Very important point. Included in this land, which a lot of
| people seem to forget about, is the roofs of buildings! This
| is currently a huge amount of area that just absorbs sunlight
| and converts a good chunk in to heat.
| jmchuster wrote:
| Right, which is why it doesn't make sense yet for countries
| like the US, where there is enough open land and connective
| infrastructure to grow plants with free sun energy.
|
| If you were to use solar, then you'd need a country that has
| a lot of land that would be better used on solar panels
| rather than farmland, so maybe one that is mostly tundras or
| deserts.
| tux1968 wrote:
| I was really only addressing the notion that vertical
| farming took up more land. If we have as much extra land as
| you say, the point is irrelevant anyway.
|
| But you need to remember that there are real costs to
| industrial farming on land. The use of pesticides,
| fertilizers and topsoil loss. There are a lot of benefits
| to vertical farming if it can be made to work economically.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Considering the pressure on the environment and biodiversity,
| and the disappearance of wilderness, I think we don't
| necessarily want to exploit more land.
|
| IMHO a key point of the article is that solar is not really a
| suitable source of electricity for vertical farming. There
| are other sources of clean electricity that more suitable in
| order to reap the benefits of vertical farming (less
| transport and less use of land, and also less water and
| pesticides).
| charlesju wrote:
| There is also a lot of land used for something else that can
| also be used for solar, ie. house roofs, roads, parking lots.
| xchaotic wrote:
| Surely it is easier and cheaper to make the land arable or a
| greenhouse or whatever than equivalent vertical farm + solar.
| KISS
| tux1968 wrote:
| How exactly do you do that in say the desert? Solar is KISS
| in many situations.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Some type of semi-reflective coating to keep heat low and
| closed loop systems? I wonder how expensive and actually
| complex would it be to find nano-scale substance that
| would reflect most of wasted light spectrum while
| allowing the one needed...
| ben_w wrote:
| Are greenhouses in deserts harder to build or maintain
| than PV farms and power lines in the same desert?
|
| Not a rhetorical question, I genuinely don't know. I
| assume it varies by desert, but farming and power are
| both way out of my domain.
| airza wrote:
| It's such an important point that's the core value
| proposition of vertical farming. Arable.land is unlikely to
| keep up with the combination of population growth and climate
| change. That's the whole point of the exercise! Solving that
| problem!
| Shivetya wrote:
| doubtful, as little far back as a decade there was
| considered to be over 2.7 billion hectares of land
| available that would was considered usable, this is mostly
| in areas like South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and
| Central America.
|
| Global Warming may actually open areas previously unsuited
| for certain crops; evidence pointed to much warmer climates
| in Europe with grapes further North in mans short
| existence, and the impact on existing uses is not fully
| understood.
|
| The simple fact is, every time someone suggest were are
| running out of food or have too many people or water is not
| wet anymore we find out that it simply is because we don't
| look further than we are standing.
|
| The biggest reason people starve today is repressive
| governments that respect neither the person or private
| property. that one percent, the ruling elite of the world,
| loses its grip in highly informed, rights driven parts of
| the world but they sure do fight to keep the pie to
| themselves even there.
| xchaotic wrote:
| Not solving it unless you solve the other problems such as
| where the energy comes from how do you deal with waste
| where do you get the water from.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > lot of land that isn't suitable for farming
|
| We're talking about powering a hydroponic greenhouse. The
| alternative to "Solar Powered LEDs" isn't "plant things in
| the ground". Its "make a glass window on your roof".
|
| --------
|
| "Plant things in the ground" is also cheaper, though it does
| suffer from potentially poor soil conditions. Still, it seems
| to me that spreading fertilizer across soil (and conditioning
| the soil into a growable state) would be cheaper and easier
| than making large-scale indoor hydroponics.
| dathinab wrote:
| > "make a glass window on your roof".
|
| Doesn't work as you can't stack plants with it nor can you
| grow them underground.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Where are you placing these solar panels? Why can't those
| locations be rooftop hydroponic farms instead?
| tux1968 wrote:
| Because rooftop hydroponic farms have to be tended to
| almost daily, or at least for planting/harvesting. Solar
| panels don't need nearly as much maintenance and allow
| you to concentrate the actual growing operations for the
| economies of scale.
|
| Do you mind if I ask why you're so against the idea?
| dragontamer wrote:
| > Do you mind if I ask why you're so against the idea?
|
| Because it is clearly inefficient to convert sunlight ->
| electricity -> simulated sunlight.
| tux1968 wrote:
| But you're ignoring the inefficiency of building separate
| hydroponic operations on individual rooftops and driving
| around to all of them, etc. Also as SamBam mention above,
| you don't have to make a simulated sun. Instead it can
| work as sun -> electricity -> narrow-spectrum-light-that-
| plants-convert-at-higher-efficiency. You might even
| genetically modify plants to be more productive with the
| smallest spectrum possible.
| [deleted]
| Ekaros wrote:
| Or the obvious solution: put hydroponics on traditional
| close to ground greenhouses... Potentially best of both
| worlds, if they are sufficiently distributed on outskirts
| of cities.
| hansvm wrote:
| > lot of land that isn't suitable for farming
|
| > We're talking about powering a hydroponic greenhouse. The
| alternative to "Solar Powered LEDs" isn't "plant things in
| the ground". Its "make a glass window on your roof".
|
| I think what they were getting at is that you can take land
| wholly unsuitable for farming or greenhouses (e.g. severe
| slopes), apply solar panels, and then funnel that energy to
| a vertical farm. Since the vertical farm does save space in
| the abstract (just not necessarily once accounting for
| space needed for electricity generation), the scheme
| overall is still a more efficient use of land.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > Since the vertical farm does save space in the abstract
| (just not necessarily once accounting for space needed
| for electricity generation)
|
| I severely doubt that.
|
| Solar panels are maybe 30% efficient. So 10-acres of
| glass-roofs need to be replaced by 30-acres of solar
| panels just to account for this inefficiency (let alone
| other inefficiencies: such as wiring, inverter,
| batteries, and LEDs). Maybe 50-acres of solar panels to
| be anywhere close to comparable against 10-acres of glass
| roofs once we include other inefficiencies.
| hansvm wrote:
| I'm not sure if you noticed, but your argument is that
| I'm not doing a good enough job accounting for the space
| needed for solar, and the thing you're trying to counter
| is that if you _ignore_ the space needed for [solar] then
| vertical farming makes sense. Those are two completely
| logically independent ideas which can't be used to refute
| each other regardless of their respective veracities.
| SamBam wrote:
| > Solar panels are maybe 30% efficient. So 10-acres of
| glass-roofs need to be replaced by 30-acres of solar
| panels
|
| Not remotely. Plants are also extremely inefficient,
| converting only about 1% of the solar energy that falls
| for their use. [1]
|
| Most of this inefficiency is from solar energy being in
| the form of frequencies that the plants can't use, but
| solar panels can. So the panels can capture this energy,
| then funnel into the red and orange lights that are most
| efficient for plant growth.
|
| I've read a bunch on this, and haven't been able to find
| an authoritative source for what the efficiency
| conversion is -- how many acres of solar panels power how
| many acres of vegetables, and is it greater or less than
| 1:1? -- but it's certainly not as simplistic as "solar
| would need 3x more land because they are 30% efficient."
|
| 1. https://phys.org/news/2012-01-energy-conversion-solar-
| cells....
| dragontamer wrote:
| > I've read a bunch on this, and haven't been able to
| find an authoritative source for what the efficiency
| conversion is -- how many acres of solar panels power how
| many acres of vegetables, and is it greater or less than
| 1:1? -- but it's certainly not as simplistic as "solar
| would need 3x more land because they are 30% efficient."
|
| I own a townhome, so my only real ability to grow plants
| is through a grow-light connected to electricity.
|
| As such, I've spent some time calculating the PAR values
| of a decent grow-light, as well as the amount of PAR that
| natural sunlight gives. Plants need a ludicrous amount of
| PAR (basically blue + red lights, green not needed cause
| green just bounces off of plants).
|
| Sunlight is mostly broad spectrum: broader than plants
| need and therefore a source of inefficiency (green light
| is wasted) that LEDs can somewhat replace.
|
| Grow-lights have a benefit that they can be placed very
| close to the plant (maybe just 1-foot away) to "focus"
| the energy a bit better. Nonetheless, the amount of PAR /
| PPFD from a typical day sun (or even a cloudy day) far
| exceeds what you'd get from 500W or even 2000W grow
| lights.
|
| --------
|
| Its just a hobby of mine, and I'm not growing anything
| especially hard (just Basil, which is really easy to
| grow... but Basil is a summer plant that really wants
| sunlight).
|
| Still, once you start calculating PAR and actually
| mapping out how much electricity your "emulated sunlight"
| needs, you'll realize how grossly inefficient that "solar
| panel -> electricity -> LED" plan really is.
|
| EDIT: Natural sun is like 2000 PPFD or something FAR in
| excess of what most plants need. Still, a good growlight
| solution might hit ~1000 PPFD constantly. Lets take this
| 650W LED and think about it:
| https://allgreenhydroponics.com/collections/american-
| made-le...
|
| You'll get ~500 to ~1000 PPFD across a 4'x4' or 16-square
| foot area from that 650W LED (and most of that light is
| focused on the center: you'll want to overlap your lights
| a bit for more consistency).
|
| Then think about how much solar panels you need to power
| a 650W LED for the 16-hours / day your typical plant
| would want (to account for the lesser PPFD indoor plants
| get, you run the lights for a bit longer than sunrise-
| sunset).
|
| Just some napkin math. Nothing serious here: just
| guestimating the area in my head.
|
| ----------
|
| EDIT: Now it should be noted: I've heard of good
| hydroponic greenhouses that have the "do both" approach:
| glass roofs to let the sun in most of the time, and LEDs
| to augment the natural sun (cloudy / rainy days, as well
| as winter-settings when you have fewer hours of sun). The
| sun isn't nearly as consistent as we'd like, but... that
| means that you need something aside from solar power
| powering those LEDs.
|
| But the concept of building a all-LED underground (or
| "inside a building") without any natural light just...
| seems grossly inefficient to me. Such a setup only seems
| useful to those growing contraband IMO.
| msla wrote:
| > "Plant things in the ground" is also cheaper, though it
| does suffer from potentially poor soil conditions.
|
| "Poor soil conditions" to include "soil" that is alkali
| dust, sand, dry for eleven months out of the year, frozen
| solid and under multiple feet of snow for more than half
| the year, and so far from either a river or reliable
| groundwater that any and all water used must be trucked in.
| In tanks. On trucks.
|
| Plus, you only get to dump more fertilizer in the water if
| you filter it back out again.
| e_y_ wrote:
| Or maybe something like what's being investigated for
| greenhouses on Mars (which gets less than half the sunlight
| that Earth receives) using mirrors and optical fiber cables
| to redirect light.
| hinkley wrote:
| Or restoring native habitat.
| Retric wrote:
| You can't put solar on land while restoring native habitat.
| Wind power is much closer to minimal impact outside of bats
| and birds.
| dathinab wrote:
| > can be used for solar.
|
| And there are many other renewal energy sources.
|
| Like geothermal power in some areas or water (fall or tide)
| based power in other areas.
|
| And you can put this power sources in a lot of places which
| are fully unusable for farming.
| marshray wrote:
| Yes, please include the cost of nuclear power in the
| considerations.
|
| (The joke here is that the true cost is undefined because we
| here in the US have no method to store the long-term hazardous
| waste it produces. Current cleanup costs for just the military
| reactor waste are estimated at $500B, for civilian reactors the
| costs are said to be higher.)
| charlesju wrote:
| 1. We have nuclear waste already
|
| 2. We will continue to have nuclear waste if we want to have
| nuclear weapons
|
| 3. You can store all the waste you need to store in a
| football field (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-
| facts-about-spent-...)
|
| Nuclear waste management is messy, but it's something we need
| to solve no matter what. It is now a sunk cost we have to
| deal with because of what we have already done and what we
| plan to keep.
|
| So if we already have to pay the fixed cost, we should reap
| as much benefit as possible.
| marshray wrote:
| Rarely does one hear the sunk cost fallacy advocated so
| enthusiastically.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| The sunk cost fallacy is about continuing to incur
| additional sunk costs. The parent is arguing that we're
| going to have to pay $X/year to manage the nuclear waste
| we've already incurred and that the cost is fixed--adding
| more nuclear waste isn't going to increase the cost.
| Whether those claims are true may be up for debate, but
| it's certainly not a sunk cost fallacy.
| marshray wrote:
| He's arguing (to paraphrase) "Because we've already
| incurred such costs we should continue or even expand the
| policy which caused them."
|
| Claiming that hazardous nuclear waste represents a fixed
| cost no matter how much you generate is simply absurd.
| wffurr wrote:
| I have this giant pile of nuclear waste that's stored
| haphazardly and needs to be dealt with at a cost of $XXX
| billions of dollars. I know! I'll keep shoveling more waste
| into the haphazard piles! Perfect!
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| The parent's point, and I don't know if it's well-founded
| or not (and consequently I'm not endorsing it, only
| clarifying), is that adding more waste doesn't seem to
| worsen the problem.
|
| As an aside, if you must snark, it's best to do it when
| you're following the thread of the conversation.
| manfredo wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel
| _re...
|
| You're overstating the cost of waste storage by two
| orders of magnitude. It's sealed into concrete cylinders.
| This doesn't look very haphazard to me: https://upload.wi
| kimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Nuclear_...
| notatoad wrote:
| the US has 80000 tonnes of spent nuclear reactor waste.
| SpaceX launch cost in 2017 was $2700/kg. presumably lower
| now.
|
| by my math, that's $215bn to launch all our nuclear waste
| into space. Is there a reason that's not a viable option?
| ant6n wrote:
| The danger of launch failure making the planet
| uninhabitable.
| notatoad wrote:
| lol, good point. that's the sort of thing that's easy to
| forget about when your involvement on a topic is limited
| to typing out comments on HN.
| choeger wrote:
| How do you imagine that would happen? Even if a rocket
| fails catastrophically, pulverizing the nuclear waste,
| distributing it evenly across earth, how do you imagine
| that would make the planet inhabitable? Is the planet
| inhabitable now, after all the atomic bombs that exploded
| and all the nuclear waste that went into the ocean?
|
| And what do you think drives the latest Mars rover,
| Perseverance?
| choeger wrote:
| It's not the safety. One could conceivably put a glas
| she'll around the burnt fuel and it would survive reentry.
|
| But first of all, the cost is still massive, even with
| SpaceX. And furthermore, you'd just put it into (decaying)
| low earth orbit that way. Further away would be even more
| expensive.
|
| Finally, spent fuel still contains a lot of energy and
| should be recycled. This in turn is a very nasty and
| expensive procedure.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| In the short term nuclear energy is expensive, but in the
| long term nuclear energy is one the cheapest sources of
| energy available. Source -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
|
| (this is even more true when you consider the cost of
| externalities)
| dale_glass wrote:
| I don't see how nuclear can win over the long term.
|
| Solar and wind are simple and very amenable to mass
| production. Many parts of them are usable for other
| purposes -- we need generators for things other than
| windmills, inverters for things other than solar
| powerplants, etc. This means we're not making things as a
| one off, but doing mass manufacturing, and the different
| users all reap benefits.
|
| They're easy to produce, which means there's lots and lots
| of competition, which pushes down price.
|
| They're easy to install, scale and maintain.
|
| They're easy to iterate, because it doesn't take billions
| to test a new design on a small scale.
|
| They don't need most of the parts nuclear has -- if you
| think of it a windmill contains parts a nuclear plant needs
| too, but unlike nuclear doesn't have all the nuclear stuff
| along with it, which isn't cheap.
|
| The way I see it, nuclear could have been successful but is
| going the way of the mainframe -- today mass computing is
| done on huge amounts of commodity hardware, and in the same
| way large, purpose built plants are already being overtaken
| by mass production of panel after panel being churned out
| of a factory, and that's not going to get any better for
| nuclear.
| manfredo wrote:
| Nuclear's non-intermittency is why it wind in the long
| run. Once intermittent sources fulfill demand during peak
| production hours, the actual cost of adding each usable
| watt goes up dramatically. If your goal is to run a
| primarily fossil fuel grid, supplemented by renewables
| that's fine. That's what Germany is doing.
|
| But if your goal is to actually eliminate carbon
| emissions, you need to factor in the cost of storage. And
| there really no feasible plan of storing the amount of
| energy required at the moment.
|
| If your goal is to actually eliminate carbon emissions,
| nuclear presents a much more realistic option. We keep
| celebrating Germany, but in reality their carbon
| emissions per KWh of electricity is not actually very
| good. It is worse than Britain. And it's ~7x worse than
| it's neighborhood to the west, which we tend to ignore
| for some reason.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| To make nuclear energy successful you need to stop fear
| mongering, and invest in improving technology. With
| scale, it will make far cheaper and reliable energy
| source than anything on earth. But it will hardly happen
| when politicians tirelessly promote solar & wind, while
| increasing the regulation of nuclear energy. And
| politicians act this way because of said fear mongering,
| which affects the public deeply.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Why bother?
|
| What reason is there to believe a generator with blades
| attached to it is going to lose to a generator with a
| containment building and reactor attached to it?
| shuckles wrote:
| Isn't the issue that the windmill also needs a large
| battery to meet demand?
| marshray wrote:
| We're a century into nuclear reactor technology.
|
| Today _is_ the long term, and the costs are still
| uncontrolled.
| kumarski wrote:
| Way overshooting the confidence on fusion here.
| kristopolous wrote:
| It's placing something that quite literally simply does not
| exist on the balance sheet.
|
| A physicist who died 55 years ago said it'd be commercially
| deployed by 1975. 1954 was the "too cheap to meter" claim by
| an investment banker who worked for the Truman
| administration. That's still quoted today, said 2 years
| before Elvis debuted on Ed Sullivan.
|
| We're all supposed to treat it like it's a valid opinion.
| While instead, 45 years after the predicted free energy for
| all bonanza, rate payers are getting hit with taxes to keep
| nuclear going. It's in practice, in actual reality, a more
| expensive option.
|
| Continue to research. March on with science, sure. But as a
| matter of public policy and planning, relying on it is pure
| fantasy.
|
| I don't know why hn is so koolaid-drunk on this stuff. It's a
| cult with 70 years of failed predictions. It's like any other
| cult. Apparently wrong predictions make the true believers
| even more fanatical.
| hobofan wrote:
| Yeah, last time I checked everyone was still on the "viable
| fusion is constantly 20 years away" meme.
| martimarkov wrote:
| It's like 20 years away!!
| labster wrote:
| Fusion is still 20 years away.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| Don't know how old you are but it's very likely that your
| children or their children will get old before fusion energy
| becomes reality.
| jzer0cool wrote:
| The blog appears to be talking about 2 very different things,
| _space utilization_ and the tradeoff of _electricity
| consumption_. I have to disagree about the statement it does not
| save space. Vertical farming is a means to utilize space in a new
| dimension, hence the word, vertical.
| klysm wrote:
| Assuming it has to be powered by solar panels is a bad
| assumption.
| macspoofing wrote:
| What else is there? Nuclear? I'm with you but it'll take
| decades before we realize that solar and wind just don't scale
| and decades more to rebuild and expand nuclear infrastructure.
| In the short term, it's either natural gas, wind/solar, and
| hydro (if your geography allows for it).
| tekno45 wrote:
| But how much space would you save if all the veggies that are
| vertical farming friendly are moved indoors?
|
| Does everything have to grow indoors? no, but we need to save the
| space for crops that need it.
| tt433 wrote:
| "Vertical Farming Does Not Save Space [when exclusively
| considering solar power]"
| onethought wrote:
| (And wheat) - do the same calculation with rice or potatoes and
| I'm sure he'd have different results.
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| Yeah, my first reaction was, "Who's actually trying to grow
| _wheat_ indoors at scale??? "
| tt433 wrote:
| And the suggestion that one can live on a loaf of bread,
| using that price to extrapolate a yearly cost, it's a true
| worst case scenario.
| [deleted]
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Vertical farming isn't necessarily about saving space. It's also
| about using typically urban spaces to grow food, where before
| there was none. It's about pest and predator mitigation. And so
| on.
| ironmagma wrote:
| This is why we have the electrical grid.
| WJW wrote:
| Quite a lot of their pages are about doing away with the
| electric grid, in increasingly unpractical ways btw. This
| article is quite on-message actually.
| choeger wrote:
| Vertical farming will almost certainly not generate the mass of
| calories to feed the world. But that doesn't mean it cannot be
| useful. Many vegetables are already grown under very controlled
| conditions and it doesn't take much fantasy to consider, e.g.,
| tomatoes from a nearby vertical farm more environmentally
| friendly than their counterparts grown in some remote sunny
| place.
|
| But of course, logistics might get cheaper as well with clean
| energy, so it's not guaranteed, either.
| [deleted]
| kazinator wrote:
| > _Artificial lighting saves land because plants can be grown
| above each other, but if the electricity for the lighting comes
| from solar panels, then the savings are canceled out by the land
| required to install the solar panels._
|
| Solar panels don't have to be on land; they can be on buildings.
| Moreover, they don't have to be on land that is arable. Moreover,
| solar is not the only way to avoid fossil fuels in the quest of
| electricity.
|
| Also, it's cheaper to transport electricity from a distant
| electric farm, than vegetables from a distant vegetable farm.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| How can you farm vertical if the earth is flat? This is the
| article the libtards don't wan you to click on because it will
| finally own them.
| [deleted]
| OliverGilan wrote:
| A lot of people seem to be misunderstanding the goals of vertical
| farming. It's not to save space, we have more than enough of
| that. It's to stop produce from being shipped hundreds of miles
| on trucks which greatly increases greenhouse emissions and
| results in less fresh produce.
|
| Transportation is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in our
| food's supply chain. When you hear about beef having such a big
| carbon footprint it's also accounting for the massive footprint
| of transporting all that beef as well as it's food. If you can
| cut that down you would be greatly reducing the carbon footprint
| of your food.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| That's an uphill battle. Been mostly solved - truck and train
| transport is pretty cheap per item. They're refrigerated and
| probably spend less time in the truck, than in the store and
| your fridge.
|
| Bit Ag is ... BIG. We're not gonna beat it at scale with a few
| pods on the balcony. Better find a different reason.
| ratsforhorses wrote:
| So wouldn't urban agriculture be a "wiser" more "open access"
| way forward?https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_agriculture I
| enjoy the idea of mixed companion planting combined with a pick
| and pay system ....we could even do it labyrinth style :-)
| User23 wrote:
| Chloroplasts are a pretty efficient way to capture and store
| solar energy already and they don't produce nearly as much toxic
| waste as solar panel manufacturing.
| 0wis wrote:
| A more long term viewpoint would be interesting. All the
| affirmations in the article are done with the current state of
| the art. Extensive farming has improved for thousands of years.
| Vertical farming is very new and room for improvement in a
| controlled environnement could be huge. Moreover, the main critic
| compare solar to fossil energy costs (in dollar and space). What
| about going nuclear ?
|
| Moreover we always learn a lot when we go sideways. What about
| useful discoveries for space exploration ?
| kibwen wrote:
| _> Artificial lighting saves land because plants can be grown
| above each other, but if the electricity for the lighting comes
| from solar panels, then the savings are canceled out by the land
| required to install the solar panels._
|
| This doesn't have to be the case. Plants don't use all the
| sunlight that hits them, because available light isn't generally
| the bottleneck in plant growth. Note how most plants are green,
| which is to say they're content with reflecting the most energy-
| dense range of the visible spectrum. Solar panels can in theory
| (and possibly in practice, I'm unsure of the current state of the
| art) yield more efficient utilization of solar energy than plants
| do. (Of course we also need to consider efficiency losses from
| reconverting the energy back into light, but I recall the reading
| that the overall system efficiency can still beat direct sunlight
| in theory (consider that the grow lights can be precisely tuned
| to only emit energy in the frequencies that plants crave).)
| Nition wrote:
| Say a plant needs 1/10th of actual full sun during the day,
| could you theoretically remove the electricity step entirely
| but "just" (putting "just" in quotes because I'm sure it
| wouldn't be easy) having some sort of fancy mirror setup on a
| 10 storey building to send 1/10th of the sunlight hitting the
| roof to each floor?
| macspoofing wrote:
| Mirrors take up space too.
| [deleted]
| Nition wrote:
| Might be significantly higher efficiency overall though vs.
| putting solar panels on the same roof?
| macspoofing wrote:
| I guess the devil is in the details but I can't see how
| mirrors will be positioned to support vertical farming.
| It's be interesting to see some viable ideas (if those
| exist).
| woeh wrote:
| Thinking aloud here; perhaps we could somehow use optical
| fibers to bend the light from rooftop to vertical farm?
| cthreepo wrote:
| maybe if the plants are fixed on a very tall pole, and spaced
| some meters from each other, because of the sunrays
| inclination, all the plants on the pole can get sunlight.
| this will not save space in a big farmland setup, because
| then the poles need to be spaced from each other in
| proportion to their height, or they will cover the sun from
| the neighbour pole, bit this can make small isolated empty
| spaces useful for growing a lot of plants.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Close, it's 1/10th of the spectrum not 1/10th of the
| intensity.
|
| The 'fancy mirrors' required would simply be a prism. You'd
| separate out the red and blue light and aim it at the plants,
| and send the green and infrared light to solar cells, to be
| used for running red and blue LEDs. (Or you could use
| flourescence if you had something that glowed red or blue
| when exposed to green or IR light).
|
| Check out this spectral plot for chlorophyll-a and -b:
|
| http://hyperphysics.phy-
| astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Biology/ligabs.ht...
|
| and compare it to this plot of the solar irradiance at
| Earth's surface:
|
| http://hyperphysics.phy-
| astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/solirrad.h...
|
| There are peaks in the clorophyl absorption spectrum at
| 400-500 and 600-700 nm (blue to UV and red), but the sunlight
| provides energy in an atmosphere-attenuated blackbody curve
| everywhere from 300-1000nm.
|
| In theory, by providing illumination with just 10% the energy
| of the sunlight's full spectrum in a narrow band from
| 420-430nm where photosynthesis is most efficient, you could
| have plants receive the same amount of energy.
|
| Unfortunately, solar cells have the exact same problem: Just
| as the proteins in chlorophyll only use certain spectral
| energies, so too the semiconductors only make efficient use
| of certain energies. Multi-bandgap solar cells can help:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-
| junction_solar_cell#/med...
|
| but in both chemical and electrical solar energy extraction,
| you're working with a particular photon energy and there's
| going to be waste.
| datenwolf wrote:
| There is this recent-ish paper (DOI: 10.1126/science.aba6630)
| on why it might be, that plants forego the peak of the solar
| spectrum. Essentially it boils down to being able to regulate
| the photochemistry of photosynthesis. If it were centered on
| the peak of the spectrum there's not a lot of regulation
| possible by means of shifting the reaction energy levels
| around.
|
| By placing the light absorbing parts of photosynthesis on the
| slopes of the spectrum, by mere adjustment of the energy levels
| the reaction undergoes it can shift its activity to parts of
| the spectrum with more or less light intensity.
| klodolph wrote:
| Solar panels can be more efficient, but if your comparison is
| between "sunlight -> plants" and "sunlight -> solar panels ->
| electric lights -> plants", you have to include the actual
| efficiency of e.g. photovoltaics and LEDs in your calculations.
|
| Photovoltaics these days have something around 15-20%
| efficiency and LEDs have conversion efficiency around 50-60%.
| The magenta grow lamps are colored for more efficient use by
| plants, and you can pack more plants in a smaller space, but at
| that point you're trying to offset energy losses on the order
| of 90%.
| totemandtoken wrote:
| Just for comparison's sake, aren't plants/photosynthesis
| something like 5% efficient?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I think that's correct, but that difference seems to be
| within the error margins for this calculation, and some
| other loss (e.g., transmission, storage, etc) could eat any
| hypothetical advantage that the vertical farming position
| might've enjoyed.
| kibwen wrote:
| Yes, and I updated my comment just as you were posting this
| to mention losses due to reconversion. However, also keep in
| mind that even large efficiency losses can still lean in
| favor of photovoltaics/LEDs, because plants only use about
| 10% of the sun's energy in the first place.
| klodolph wrote:
| The problem with talking about photosynthetic efficiency is
| that there are different endpoints you can talk about. The
| more efficient plants (C4 plants like sugarcane and maize)
| have something like 4% efficiency converting sunlight to
| biomass, but they actually absorb a 53% of the incoming
| light based on spectrum, and lose about 24% of the energy
| because photons with shorter wavelengths have excess energy
| which the plants cannot use. We're not interested in the 4%
| figure, we're interested in the 53% and 24% figure because
| they represent the part of the process that we can change.
|
| Doing the math, that's around 59% loss which you could
| mitigate by using LEDs that produce the correct spectrum--
| but solar panels and LEDs have 90% losses, so you're
| noticeably worse off.
|
| It's worth remembering that the reason why plants only
| absorb certain parts of the spectrum is the same reason why
| photovoltaic panels only absorb certain parts of the
| spectrum--in both cases, you are using light to move
| electrons, and these processes only capture energy that
| corresponds to the underlying band gap. Light with shorter
| wavelengths has additional energy which is wasted, both for
| photovoltaics and for plants.
|
| You can increase the efficiency by creating multijunction
| solar panels, which results in multiple band gaps. For most
| applications, these aren't cost-effective. If I remember
| correctly, plants are also "multi-junction", which explains
| why they are so efficient.
| bsder wrote:
| > It's worth remembering that the reason why plants only
| absorb certain parts of the spectrum is the same reason
| why photovoltaic panels only absorb certain parts of the
| spectrum
|
| Plants are green because they value light _consistency_
| instead of _total energy_. Green light has too many peaks
| and valleys and can overload the photosynthesis systems
| so they reflect a lot of it.
|
| It's the "renewables without batteries" problem only in
| biology.
| klodolph wrote:
| > Green light has too many peaks and valleys and can
| overload the photosynthesis systems so they reflect a lot
| of it.
|
| This doesn't make any sense to me. Why would peaks and
| valleys overload something? Why would green light have
| more peaks and valleys?
|
| I was a bit sloppy with the way I phrased that--what I
| really meant was "the reason why plants use specific
| quanta of light is the same reason why photovoltaics
| absorb specific quanta of light" but I didn't put much
| thought into how worded it.
|
| Plants absorb light near two different spectral peaks.
| This is not entirely dissimilar to the idea of a
| multijunction photovoltaic cell. The color of light
| between the two peaks is green.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| Even more to the point- solar panels live quite easily on
| roofs, deserts, highway medians. Quite a bit tougher to put
| functioning agriculture in these places!
| notriddle wrote:
| Green roofs are a thing, though.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_roof
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| > Note how most plants are green, which is to say they're
| content with reflecting the most energy-dense range of the
| visible spectrum.
|
| Photosynthesis is very complex, and there are reasons why
| plants shed about 10% of green light:
| https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6498/1490 . It's not
| that evolution was too dumb to discover the simple fact of
| green light being more energy dense, it's that there's other
| more important constraints happening at the molecular level in
| photosynthesis.
| eatbitseveryday wrote:
| Plants desire more stability in energy output from
| photosynthesis (e.g., clouds moving overhead) at a lower
| level, rather than attaining maximum output. Trying to always
| maximize output means you'll have high fluctuations in energy
| output.
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| Depending on the geography and building design, you can carry
| light to the plants via optic fiber. They act as a light
| pipe/optical waveguide. No need for any photovoltaic solar
| panels. However this design necessitates a skyscraper in the
| middle of the desert with nothing else blocking line of sight.
| Great if you are in the Middle East. Not so great for New York
| or Seattle. For the latter cities, a permanent barge on the
| Hudson/Puget with a fiber optic connection could be a solution
| (the losses would be great and it may not be much cheaper than
| using electricity, geography and land costs will have to be
| carefully accounted for).
|
| Here are some simplified designs for home use:
| https://www.lowes.com/pl/Tubular-skylights-Skylights-accesso...
|
| Some commercial suppliers: http://www.huvco.com/
|
| The technology is very cut and dry. If you are a well funded
| startup, it may be more economical to acquire an optic fiber
| skylight manufacturer instead of ordering OEM.
| timothyduong wrote:
| "Light, its what plants crave!"
| mutatio wrote:
| Plants use green light:
| https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/green_light_is_it_important_fo...
|
| In fact the idea of light frequency restriction is dying a
| death in LED grow lights, sun-like full spectrum with deep red
| and UV ranges have proven to be superior to specific ranges
| (blurple).
|
| Light being a bottleneck isn't very meaningful as plant growth
| is adjusted by a bunch of levers, e.g. increase respiration and
| nutrients and more light energy can be utilized - obviously
| there's limiting factors in plant biology.
| mssundaram wrote:
| > the sun provides free energy and the clouds free water
|
| This is somewhat tangential to the author's point, however
| considering the resources from the Earth as free (not the sun)
| has been a disaster - environmentally, socially and economically.
| It's like double entry accounting but only entering on one side.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Most agricultural water costs are from growing crops in areas
| where there is not enough rainfall: California's Imperial
| Valley is a desert (3 inches of rain per year) and produces $1
| billion of food and cotton each year. Then all the waste runs
| into the Salton Sea -- another unpaid-for externality.
| abeppu wrote:
| So, maybe someone here knows the number -- but what would the
| cost of a loaf of bread be (or what would the multiplicative
| factor on food costs be) if we restrained ourselves to
| growing without irrigation?
| ravi-delia wrote:
| That being said, exactly 0 of the listed examples are actually
| bad to consider free. If you don't collect rain coming down,
| it'll just come down anyway.
| manicdee wrote:
| If you collect the rain coming down, someone downstream ends
| up with no water.
|
| Water is not free.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Not really, since other than the small amount of water that
| gets shipped out in the plant, the rest is just released
| right back out. Besides, as long as you're _only_
| collecting the water that falls directly on you as rain,
| you 're not taking any more than your lot; someone
| 'downstream' can also collect water that falls directly on
| them.
| gpm wrote:
| Farming depleting water tables has been an issue. It's not
| that it won't come down anyways, but that it won't go
| wherever it was going next anyways.
| villasv wrote:
| Interfering with the hydrologic cycle can impact soil quality
| and may result in bunch of biome effects. It can also have
| good effects instead of bad effects, though. It really
| depends on the local dynamics.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Interfering with the hydrologic cycle can impact soil
| quality and may result in bunch of biome effects.
|
| Sure but people also need to eat.
| villasv wrote:
| Yes, they do. 100% correct, 100% missed the point.
| cjcenizal wrote:
| Degraded soil quality and adverse biome effects can
| reduce the amount of available food.
| Technically wrote:
| I assumed this was meant in terms of energy required to exploit
| the resource--if water's literally falling from the sky the
| energy required is zero.
| worker767424 wrote:
| Vertical farming mostly feels like a solution in search of a
| problem. It uses relatively expensive technology to produce low-
| value products. Putting seeds in the ground, tilling, and waiting
| is _absurdly_ cheap compared to building growhouses. For some
| perspective, what farms actually do extend growing seasons is put
| "greenhouses" around cold-sensitive crops like tomatoes, but a
| "greenhouse" in this case is a wire hoop with clear plastic
| around it.
|
| It's interesting if you want to support 50B people on Earth, but
| the resources required to build it out mean it isn't really even
| a viable solution for restoring farmland to wildland without
| massive amounts of mining.
| hctaw wrote:
| The greater problem to solve is maximizing nutrition for
| communities while minimizing the carbon costs of providing it.
| Vertical farms fit into that equation by moving production
| closer to the people that eat the produce, and making it more
| available to food/nutrition deserts in urban areas.
|
| Extending growing seasons or returning farmlands to wildlands
| miss that point. The bigger problem in the latter is livestock
| anyway.
| mannerheim wrote:
| Most of the carbon costs of providing food comes from the
| process of growing it, not transporting it. Most of the
| carbon costs in transportation also come from consumers
| driving to and from grocery stores. See: https://www.salon.co
| m/2012/06/16/eating_local_hurts_the_plan...
| 6DM wrote:
| Aside from what the other commenters are saying around trucking
| the produce. Another benefit of growing indoors that you no
| longer need pesticides to keep bugs from destroying your crops.
|
| Edit: also it's supposed to use a lot less water
| pydry wrote:
| It's a solution for taking trucks off the road and avoiding
| waste from spoiled produce.
|
| It's not a solution for saving land.
| farisjarrah wrote:
| If a vertical farm scales up and sells their produce to a
| super market, dont they still have to package up all the food
| and ship it on trucks before it gets to the end user?
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| Yes but the idea is you are now shipping it 5 miles instead
| of 500 miles.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| My local supermarket has hydroponics on site and sells them
| there.
| jokoon wrote:
| It's certainly not cheap in carbon, which is the main problem
| in farming.
|
| Vertical farming optimizes water and transport.
|
| I admit that I'm not entirely convinced about vertical farming,
| but I'm confident it has a future. I'm still curious about
| using leds and yield.
| SimianLogic2 wrote:
| This article is more about indoor farming than vertical farming
| (is it even vertical if there's only one row?). I grow lettuce
| indoors. It serves as a nice houseplant and fresh source of salad
| greens for lunch. It's fairly new, so the cost isn't that much
| different than just buying lettuce. Once I start building my own
| "pods" instead of buying the brand-name pods, though, I expect
| it'll be a bit cheaper than buying 4 bags of lettuce every week
| (although it doesn't produce enough to fully replace buying
| greens).
|
| Mine produced ~4 bags over 6 weeks for an energy cost of ~$5 and
| a negligible amount of water. I think I can get the per-plant
| cost down to ~$0.50 once I start using my own seeds, so around
| $10 over 6 weeks to replace 4 bags of salad at around $3 each...
| a grand savings of $2. We're moving around 4 bags of greens a
| week between 2 adults, so I'd need to 6x that to replace all the
| greens we're eating, which gets the savings up to ~$2/week.
|
| The cost savings is negligible -- I do it because it's neat and I
| like having a houseplant I can eat. It's also MUCH easier for a
| residential system to offset its energy usage than a commercial
| setup (I have way more square footage on my roof than I would
| ever "grow" inside my house).
|
| The calorie argument is more compelling, but how many thousands
| of years did it take for people to get wheat so calorically
| dense? I think it's going to take time to develop nutrient-rich
| crops specifically tailored for indoor farming.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Is that including amortizing the space it uses in the house?
| That's not really free.
| SimianLogic2 wrote:
| https://twitter.com/SimianLogic/status/1361768051276992514
|
| Kind of free? There was nothing in that space before.
| golemiprague wrote:
| You didn't calculate the cost of your work and time, isn't it
| worth more than $2 per week?
| jseliger wrote:
| Have you written comprehensively about the system you've set up
| and how it works? I've thought about a Zipgrow system or
| similar: https://shop.zipgrow.com/products/small?variant=316809
| 164227..., but, as you can see, it's fairly costly to set up. I
| don't think it'll be cheaper than the grocery store, but it
| also seems fun and like the final product may taste better.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| I haven't written about mine, but I built one using an
| aquarium pump, a couple of food grade bus tubs (the kind wait
| staff use to clear restaurant tables), a couple LED panels,
| and some basic plastic cups. I grow basil, lettuce, bok choy,
| cilantro, and it doubles as a good setup for getting
| vegetable starts going in early spring. It was probably a
| couple hundred bucks to get going, but it's low maintenance
| and I get produce and herbs on demand.
| SimianLogic2 wrote:
| I'm just using a 9-plant Aerogarden Bounty right now (think
| it was ~$175 on Black Friday). My wife says I can upgrade to
| an indoor Tower Garden or Lettucegrow if I do 3-4 cycles on
| this thing without getting bored.
|
| I also built six 4ftx4ft raised (dirt) beds in our back yard
| a few years back. I plant fairly densely (usually using 1x1
| squares for most things, 2x2 for tomatoes) and I'm thinking
| about trying one of the tower gardens as a replacement for a
| single 4x4 bed this growing season. It's been a minute since
| I ran the numbers, but I think you can plant 20-25 plants on
| one tower vs maybe 4-16 in a single bed and theoretically not
| have to weed/water as much (but then you get pump
| maintenance/ph balance/feeding/cleaning instead).
| the_gastropod wrote:
| I understood the point to be more about the energy inputs. The
| gist of it is: plants are more efficient at capturing energy
| from the sun directly than indirectly via solar panels -> light
| bulbs -> plants (which seems obvious, when you state it that
| way).
|
| The only thing that makes vertical farming make any financial
| sense, today, is the access to cheap (subsidized) fossil fuels.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> plants are more efficient at capturing energy from the sun
| than solar panels - > light bulbs -> plants are_
|
| This is a counterintuitive misconception that I mention
| elsewhere in this thread. Plants aren't optimized for raw
| sunlight utilization, because that's not the bottleneck for
| growth or survival. Plants deliberately reflect away 90% of
| the sun's energy
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency)
| because other factors are more important:
| https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants-green-to-
| reduc...
| falcolas wrote:
| > deliberately reflect away 90% of the sun's energy
|
| They'll have that same efficiency with artificial lighting
| too... At least until our grow lights stop emitting light
| in the green spectrum (not something I expect to see
| anytime soon).
| ryder9 wrote:
| almost like the people who designed growlights knew that
| and the technology that limits spectrums useful to plants
| has existed for at least a decade or more
|
| with LEDs now they're even more efficient
| kibwen wrote:
| Grow lights are quite good at only emitting light in
| certain parts of the spectrum, and have been for some
| time now.
| falcolas wrote:
| Just looking at some spectrum charts for grow lights...
| They certainly vary, but not in any uniform fashion.
|
| There is an exception to this: there is a standard LED
| graph which shows up quite frequently, identified by it's
| peeks in the deep reds, yellow, and dark blue, with a
| marked trough at cyan.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The cost of transporting the conventionally grown plants
| would have to be accounted for as well, but I'd be pretty
| surprised if that got anywhere near tipping the scale over to
| vertical farming.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I wonder if that could be solved more easily. Build
| sufficient rail network and hydrogen/electric/other zero-
| carbon trucks to move produce from production to there and
| then train it in. And this is really a sector we could
| fully automated almost already.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Also, building a zero-carbon transport system would be
| generally useful for transporting things other lettuce.
| And that's probably like 80% of the way toward a zero-
| carbon transit system. I think you have a good point.
| carapace wrote:
| One thing to look at for any agricultural system is the long-term
| effect on soil fertility. Are you building up healthy soil and
| biomass over time, or diminishing it?
| KorematsuFred wrote:
| This classic example is why some journalists need some real good
| education in Economics.
|
| How many sq feet of land do you need to grow say 1000KG of wheat
| ? That number would widely vary. In Nevada that number would be
| really really huge compared to say fertile soil of Kansas. But
| with a vertical farming that number can be made much more uniform
| all across the geography. With a vertical farm someone in Nevada
| might put to use the vast empty land they have to produce wheat.
|
| At the end of the day, success of vertical farming would come
| from such efficient usage of land and in my opinion even if
| authors narrow case of growing wheat using solar panels comes to
| fruition would still lead to more efficient use of land
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| There is lots of land, at least in the USA, covered in parking
| lots, buildings, roads that would be excellent places for solar
| panels. But acreage of cultivated land peaked in the Fifties. We
| could till far more land than we do now. In the USA, vertical
| farming is a solution in search of a problem.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| >Vertical Farming Does Not Save Space
|
| Vertical farming in its current form doesn't save space. I use
| regular recycled containers, milk jugs, cans etc. with a DIY
| mount on one of the walls of my house. Last season's harvest was
| about 80-90 pounds of tomatoes, multiple harvests of beets,
| lettuce, spinach and herbs. The wall is almost 20 ft x 20 ft.
| Even if my spacing is double that of regular farming, that's
| still a lot of space saved. Sure, not all crops can be vertically
| farmed, but plenty of them can be and thereby saving precious
| land.
| Klwohu wrote:
| It doesn't grow many crops, either. I can see it being useful for
| restricted spaces like balconies or roof top gardens in cities,
| also because unlike soil gardening the weight is much less even
| accounting for the hydroponic growing solution. And of course,
| the gem of the new "industry," the place in Jackson which is a
| special case, tucked away up in the mountains where it can be
| hard to get in and out without delays, but wealthy enough to have
| practically every luxury brand in the world operating a store or
| two.
|
| To me though the issue with hydroponically grown produce,
| vertical OR horizontal, is they taste insipid. I'm not sure if
| anybody's done a study on, say, lycopene in tomatoes grown
| hydroponically vs. conventionally but I'd guess there's less of
| everything in the hydros. This is a known problem in the normal
| supermarkets and people have been complaining about bland veggies
| for many years.
|
| I will admit it's useful and can make money in certain
| situations. And it's funny as a gag, too.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En3TYdWfwaw
| abeppu wrote:
| My understanding was part of the reason we get bland veggies in
| the supermarket is that selection has been for being able to
| stay good for a longer period and not be damaged during
| shipping. If vertical farms have less time between harvesting
| and actual eating, maybe we can pick tastier varietals?
| Klwohu wrote:
| What if the taste of the particular strain isn't what causes
| blandness, but growing it in water with plant food mix
| instead of soil is? It might be possible to develop choose
| tastier breeds for hydroponic use but it's likely that even
| they would taste even better if grown in real soil on a farm,
| with all the added nutrient intake that sustains.
|
| So far the most success has been with fast-growing salad
| mixes and such, and to me it resembles an offshoot of the
| fresh sprout industry more than a heavy lifting type of
| agriculture meant to sustain the billions.
| klodolph wrote:
| That may be the reason for bland veggies in the supermarkets,
| but my personal experience with hydroponics is that they're
| noticeable blander than what you get at the supermarket.
|
| If your goal is better veggies, it is often possible to
| source them just by trying different grocery stores. Some
| grocery stores rely heavily on larger (national)
| distributors, and other stores reliably provide a decent
| selection of locally sourced foods.
| abeppu wrote:
| I feel like whenever I hear about people interested in vertical
| farming, it's typically centered around greens, or something
| where freshness is highly important. Is this responding to some
| group of people who are actually enthusiastic about indoor
| vertical farming of cereal crops? Notably absent from this is
| discussion of transport, storage and refrigeration. People have
| long complained about the 3000 mile ceasar salad. Is it better to
| grow lettuce and tomatoes far away and ship them to mostly urban
| consumers, or is it better to grow those in/near urban areas for
| local consumption? This is a real question; if someone has
| numbers on the per-serving energy cost of refrigerated shipping,
| and how they compare to the lighting energy cost, I think that
| would be an important comparison.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| I feel like this whole thing is like arguing over how many angels
| can dance on the head of a pin.
|
| We have a shit tonne of land. And we already grow vastly more
| food than we need. So why do we care? Aside from maybe building
| farms on Mars, what is the expected use of this tech?
| ratsforhorses wrote:
| Lack of diversity and vegetables are expensive ; the former
| leads to overuse of all those "-ides"(and fertilizer) and the
| 2nd to the obesity epidemic, because derivatives from corn are
| so much cheaper...
| ftr45 wrote:
| >If the electricity for a vertical farm is supplied by solar
| panels so use nuclear
| aaron695 wrote:
| Making thousands of commuters drive past your 'city' farm to get
| to work burns a lot of fuel too.
|
| It's hard to know what to do with people who don't get even that.
|
| I guess get them to pay $$$ for their energy intensive crops in
| their fancy cafes. Which if they are happy doesn't make that bad.
| The environmental movement doesn't help the environment, but it
| does make people happy, if they would just stop proselytizing
| it'd be ok.
| neonbjb wrote:
| There are other reasons to farm indoors (or in vertical farms)
| than electricity and water too.
|
| Pests are one such reason. They are extremely difficult to
| control outdoors, but far simpler to do so inside. Both
| fertilizer and pesticide treatments (if necessary) can be far
| more specific - e.g. less wasteful and environmentally damaging)
| when done indoors. Similarly, inclement weather generally does
| not affect indoor farms.
|
| There's also my favorite argument: if we're ever going to try to
| colonize space or other planets, we better be damned good at
| growing plants artificially. IMO every dollar spent improving
| this space gets us one step closer to unlinking our future from
| Earth's.
| kumarski wrote:
| LCOE and chemical footprint of vertical farming probably only
| makes sense if you're growing non-calorically dense foods.
| gm wrote:
| This is one of those headlines that are missing the word "yet" at
| the end. All of the problems brought up are solvable, given
| enough time and resources.
|
| Also given some f-ing ingenuity. This quote is just disingenuous:
| "the savings are canceled out by the land required to install the
| solar panels". Can't you just install solar panels vertically as
| well? A single web search for "vertical solar panels" brings up
| alternatives and even this article from 2017:
| https://offgridworld.com/3d-solar-panel-towers-increase-ener... .
| I'm sure a thorough search will solve that problem right away.
|
| I just think the author has a beef against this type of farming
| and is playing dumb to validate his opinion.
| Majromax wrote:
| > This quote is just disingenuous: "the savings are canceled
| out by the land required to install the solar panels". Can't
| you just install solar panels vertically as well?
|
| More to the point, solar panels don't need to be installed on
| _arable land_. Solar panels can be installed in low-fertility
| areas like deserts; offshore wind turbines are absolutely not
| displacing farmland.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| One suggestion I like a lot is making walls with solar panels
| along highways. They'd reduce sound pollution, hinders wild
| animals to run into the road while at the same time producing
| electricity in a space not used for anything else.
| e_y_ wrote:
| It wouldn't be particularly efficient, given that most of
| the day less than half the panels would be receiving direct
| sunlight.
|
| I think a more practical option would be to put the solar
| panels above the road, such as https://www.theguardian.com/
| environment/2011/jun/06/tunnel-s... or
| https://renewsable.net/2017/06/28/south-korean-bike-
| highway-...
| hctaw wrote:
| On the homes, offices, and industrial parks surrounding the
| vertical farms as well.
| dathinab wrote:
| > paradox unless fossil
|
| Or some of the other many non solar panel renewable energy
| sources, like gaining electricity from water (fall or sea tide)
| wind or geothermal sources.
|
| And while atom power is human unfriendly (i.e. humans are weak
| against it) it not so much climate unfriendly and even nature
| itself can live fairly fine with the radiation pollution they
| might cause in the worst case. Sure humans are not fine, we have
| societies and are long lived enough so that the cancer caused
| from such radiation poltion is a serious problem.
| nostromo wrote:
| > Artificial lighting saves land because plants can be grown
| above each other, but if the electricity for the lighting comes
| from solar panels, then the savings are canceled out by the land
| required to install the solar panels.
|
| Is this true?
|
| Plants use specific ranges of light (narrow bands of red and
| blue). Solar panels absorb a broad array of wavelengths. So isn't
| it at least possible that one solar panel could produce more than
| its size worth of productive sunlight for the purposes of
| photosynthesis?
| pwinnski wrote:
| An inefficient art installation uses a lot of electricity and
| water to grow wheat in a single layer (where's the "vertical"
| part?), but I'm not seeing what that has to do with any actual
| efforts at vertical farming.
| changoplatanero wrote:
| Do they really need 600 watts of light for one square meter?
| novembermike wrote:
| This ignores nuclear power. It also ignores the fact that you can
| put solar panels in places that you can't put farms such as the
| desert.
| Groxx wrote:
| nuclear, geothermal, loads of other power sources yeah.
|
| I think vertical farming is fairly ridiculous in practice, but
| this article is fighting against a very obvious strawman.
| mannerheim wrote:
| You can put farms in the desert. Some of the most productive
| farmland is in deserts. Arizona and California are both noted
| for producing large quantities of high-quality cotton.
| wernercd wrote:
| and those productive farms also use copious amounts of water
| that isn't available otherwise. (IE: piped in from rivers far
| away causing no shortage of ancillary problems:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/magazine/the-water-
| wars-o... )
| dv_dt wrote:
| Which also brings up a question if indoor farms recycle
| their water? At the very least, I might expect the
| transpiration rate to be lower, lowering water use.
| mannerheim wrote:
| It comes with its own set of problems, but deserts are not
| dealbreakers for agriculture as the GP suggests.
| Grakel wrote:
| Incredible amount of lettuce is grown in Arizona as well!
| high_byte wrote:
| exactly... you can have a farm in the middle of the city and a
| solar farm in the middle of the desert...
| yongjik wrote:
| You can also have an airport in the middle of a city and an
| apartment complex in the middle of the desert - there's
| nothing that stops them technologically. The problem is that
| they don't make economical sense.
| vondur wrote:
| We also have problems with environmentalists who oppose solar
| in the desert here in California. I don't think they have
| been successful judging by the amount of solar installations
| I've seen here.
| distribot wrote:
| Is this a substantial number of environmentalists? I've
| never encountered the sentiment.
| shagie wrote:
| The idea of growing something from grow lights powered by only
| nuclear power is intriguing to me as it is food that never got
| its energy from our sun. Instead, that power came from cast of
| atoms from merging neutron stars billions of years ago.
| [deleted]
| mattferderer wrote:
| An interesting proposal was discussed by some people on Twitter
| recently. They discussed it around using Bitcoin mining to create
| a larger demand for electricity when prices are cheap. Then when
| an event happens such as in Texas recently, electricity prices
| would go up, causing mining rigs to turn off since it's no longer
| economical. There would then be more available electricity for
| heating homes & businesses.
|
| One would assume vertical farming could be discussed in the same
| situation. Plants, like mining rigs could go offline for a few
| days without a major impact I assume, when prices sky rocket due
| to a major event such as a heat wave or blizzard. Keeping the
| vertical farm building at a reasonable temperature would be
| another factor here.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| So, burn tons of fossil fuels to mine bitcoin, thus forcing
| tons of fossil fuels to be burned to build new generating
| capacity? Nope, can't think of any issues with it.
| mattferderer wrote:
| We waste tons of energy every day on useless things. I'm not
| trying to argue Bitcoins energy usage vs alternatives. To me
| the thought provoking part is increases demand but for things
| that could be turned off for a while. I think vertical
| farming is especially interesting in that case.
|
| Yes we want things to use less energy & be more efficient. I
| hope that goes without saying.
| [deleted]
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