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Vertical farming does not save space

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Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#241

Post by sir_bearington »

dale_glass wrote: post #221
manfredo wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nuclear's cost is almost entirely in the infrastructure, and it's paid over a very long time period. The business plan for nuclear is to spend a decade or two paying back your loans, after which you make big $$$ because the plant costs relatively little to run. The ideal plan for nuclear is to pump out power at 100% 24/7. You save nothing by being idle, and you want to pay off your loan as soon as possible. All that…

Yes, nuclear hardly costs any more to run at 100% capacity than it does at 50% capacity. That's why decarbonization with renewables as a primary source doesn't make much sense.

Solar and wind are both intermittent. Wind is dependent on the weather and experiences situations with near zero production for long stretches of time. Solar is also weather dependent, and has day-night cycles on top of it.

This is fine if you're not actually looking to decarbonize a grid, just trying to opportunistically shave off carbon emissions here and there in a primarily fossil fuel grid. But if you're actually trying to eliminate fossil fuel use this is not a good approach. Theoretically we could store excess energy, but no scalable storage solution exists at the moment. That leaves nuclear power plants to serve as a dispatchable source. But as you pointed out, nuclear plants are just as cheap to run 24/7 as it does to run intermittently. So why not just build the nuclear plants and skip the renewables?

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#242

Post by shuckles »

pfdietz wrote: post #215
shuckles wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t the issue that the windmill also needs a large battery to meet demand?

Storage is needed, but storage has finite cost, and the cost is falling rapidly. Nuclear's window of opportunity is now closed.

All of that is irrelevant to the argument that wind wins because it’s simpler, which is what I was trying to engage with.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#243

Post by the-dude »

maxharris wrote: post #59

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…

Fusion is 30 years away, not 10. Always has been.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#244

Post by Daho0n »

>"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"

Seems disingenuous.

1) Solar panels can take up space in areas not useable for farming, like areas with too little water and too much sun.

2) Wind energy is moving offshore taking no space from farming at all.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#245

Post by sir_bearington »

pfdietz wrote: post #237
manfredo wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, as evidenced by the extensive storage infrastructure being deployed /s. The US has 25 GWh of storage, as compared to an hourly electricity consumption of 500 GWh. Literally less than ten minutes of storage. Almost all of it hydroelectric, which is a big infrastructure project on par with building nuclear power plants I'm sure you're eager to talk about how thermal storage, or concret weights with pulleys, or c…

> Right, as evidenced by the extensive storage infrastructure being deployed /s. Invalid argument. > The US has 25 GWh of storage, as compared to an hourly electricity consumption of 500 GWh. Literally less than ten minutes of storage. Almost all of it hydroelectric, which is a big infrastructure project on par with building nuclear power plants Irrelevant point. Storage was marginal in the past because there wasn't…

California has already saturated the daytime energy demand on sunny days. So does Hawaii. The market forces already exist. But people aren't building storage. Because it's not feasible, short of a decisive breakthrough in storage technology.

Maybe one of the proposed storage solutions will pan out. But building out trillions of dollars of infrastructure projects on the hope that a future breakthrough will make storage feasible is very risky. Fusion has been 10-20 years away for the past 50 years. General artificial intelligence has been 10-20 years away for the past 50 years. Between:

1. Going with a known solution, that already generates more electricity than solar and wind combined and one we have 70 years of experience working with.

2. Going with a solution contingent on a massive technological breakthrough to actually work.

When the stakes are as high as climate change, I cannot even remotely justify going with #2 over #1 even if the costs are potentially lower on paper.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#246

Post by gary_0 »

gh02t wrote: post #165
benjaminjackman wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 improvi…

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.

The only way significant progress on commercial fusion is likely by 2030 is if it's approached by industry and government similarly to how COVID vaccine development was -- everyone drops everything and throws everything they've got at it. Another example of similar financial and institutional commitment would be the Apollo program.

This level of commitment will probably only happen if climate change (and the related ecological and economic collapses) are taken as seriously as COVID, which is unlikely since, once the effects become obvious as COVID, it will be too late. And even COVID has large numbers of people denying reality.

Even if a massive commitment to fusion started now, by 2030 we'd likely only have a promising proof-of-concept or two, with several more failed projects on the side. Wide-scale deployment would still be years away even with many companies tooling up to start building pilot commercial reactors while assuming high financial risk, since profitability would be far from guaranteed.

[edit] Another point of comparison would be semiconductor manufacturing advances over the past 10 years. Tens of billions were spent researching and building factories, and in the end only a few companies made it to 7nm. And that was a clearly profitable endeavor iterating on already proven techniques!

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#247

Post by bparsons »

maxharris wrote: post #59

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…

I don't know about the US, but in Canada, you have at least three provinces that produce way more hydroelectric power than they can consume. Vertical farming would theoretically make sense in places like this where power is cheap, low carbon and plentiful.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#248

Post by mediaman »

Vertical farm companies attract a lot of attention from tech people who love the idea of hermetically sealed crop growing, but it's not where the action is.

That's because climate controlled hydroponic greenhouses get you most of the way there - no need for arable land, faster crop turns, ability to plant in more climates - but use free energy, at vastly lower capital and operating costs.

The vertical farm premise is that we really need to do climate-controlled growing very close to city centers, using warehouses or something. But the math just doesn't pencil out.

Climate controlled is a benefit. But there's very few tradeoffs to putting it 200 miles outside of a city center where real estate is cheap anyway. And that's where the smart money is going - right now, millions of square feet of climate controlled greenhouse space is being built across North America to service regional population hubs, at a cost of billions of dollars. Vastly more produce will be made in these greenhouses than vertical farms.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#249

Post by [deleted] »

mediaman wrote: post #248

Vertical farm companies attract a lot of attention from tech people who love the idea of hermetically sealed crop growing, but it's not where the action is. That's because climate controlled hydroponic greenhouses get you most of the way there - no need for arable land, faster crop turns, ability to plant in more climates - but use free energy, at vastly lower capital and operating costs. The vertical farm premise is…

[deleted]

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#250

Post by airhead969 »

tekno45 wrote: post #60

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.

Consider countries like Spain where outdoor farming is no longer possible due to climate change. Indoor ag, of whatever kind, will likely be essential in many places.
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