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.
installing solar plants in arid regions should compensate for the energy needs of those vertical farms, no ? also climate controlled farms should save on water consumption since water evaporation is minimized. also a vertical farm with a studied location is probably beneficial from a business standpoint: the weather is more predictable inside a vertical farm instead the one of an open field. climate change and unpredicted weather is what made agriculture energy-hungry.
Solar power has timing, storage and transmission issues that adding to it this way won’t help. And it’s all on municipal water systems, so not only is it impacting the treated water source for home, and the aquifer it’s pulled from, it has to be treated to remove chloramines before used on plants.
I have no idea why people have this urge to even further industrialize the food supply, and they’ll be the first to scream for “natural” food sources, yet think that putting food production indoors with artificial light, heat, nutrients and non-natural water sources is somehow better.
Yes, heating, lighting and cooling a building should reduce GHG.
It’s the transport emissions dude. These can be built in cities.
The transport emissions are negligible compared to the imbued energy of an entire building, let alone the operating energy.
Fine, but grid power is (and will increasingly be) powered by renewables, whereas transport will rely on fossil fuels for much longer
As mandates loom for ICE vehicle production to end, and trucks are becoming EV. Now you’re just stretching, even that part of the argument falls down.
Bulk transport is pretty energy efficient. Transport makes the smallest part of food emissions.
installing solar plants in arid regions should compensate for the energy needs of those vertical farms, no ? also climate controlled farms should save on water consumption since water evaporation is minimized. also a vertical farm with a studied location is probably beneficial from a business standpoint: the weather is more predictable inside a vertical farm instead the one of an open field. climate change and unpredicted weather is what made agriculture energy-hungry.
Solar power has timing, storage and transmission issues that adding to it this way won’t help. And it’s all on municipal water systems, so not only is it impacting the treated water source for home, and the aquifer it’s pulled from, it has to be treated to remove chloramines before used on plants.
I have no idea why people have this urge to even further industrialize the food supply, and they’ll be the first to scream for “natural” food sources, yet think that putting food production indoors with artificial light, heat, nutrients and non-natural water sources is somehow better.