Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vertical farming does not save space

lowtechmagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 464 posts

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#271

Post by glenstein »

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…

>This entire piece is based on the assumption that the only sources of energy are solar panels and fossil fuels. This is false.

Right, and more than that, it appears to be relying on the old fallacy that a solar panel takes up "land" the same way a field of corn does, to the exclusion of other uses.

That is not necessarily the case, especially when we're imaging strategic uses of space that might become more prevalent in the future. Solar panels can go on top of things, including other solar panels in the form of vertical solar farms.

If we talked about pages of books the same way we talk about solar panels, you could claim that War & Peace takes up an acre of space.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#272

Post by jshevek »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #133
wffurr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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.

Yes, even further the guidelines suggest that snark has no place on HN. One day we may undo the damage done by the massive influx of C19 redditers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit:

Replying to the misrepresentation of my words:

I did not state that HN is turning into Reddit. HN is not turning into reddit. The culture of HN has been damaged, however, by the lack of acculturation of last years influx.

Quoting the guidelines is not "throwing them at" other users. Please read the words actually written.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#274

Post by pfdietz »

sir_bearington wrote: post #263
pfdietz wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The market forces already exist. And that is a recent thing there. The global market is still developing, and technologies don't materialize instantly. CO2 taxes are still low (or zero) just about everywhere. But hey, I hope you are also not going to claim nuclear will be cheaper in the future, because I could reflect that argument right back at you. And I could observe that, unlike with renewables and storage, nuc…

No, it's not "worst case we spent a bit more". Total global lithium ion battery production amounts to less than one hour of storage for the United States alone . Things like pulleys and synthetic methane remain in the prototyping stage. By this logic why not just use fusion? It's possible. We don't know which exact approach we'll use (lasers, magnets, etc.). We don't know how cheap it'll be, but hey it'll happen even…

No, it is "worst case we spend a bit more". We absolutely know that storage is possible. Pumped thermal electricity storage, for example, uses only well understood technologies.

We solve climate change by raising CO2 costs high enough. Again, this is not a go-no go thing, it is just haggling over the price.

> We're already at the point where markets are starting to see saturation with renewables.

This just means CO2 taxes aren't high enough. BTW, they'd have to be $300-400/ton for new nuclear to compete with gas in the US.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#275

Post by pfdietz »

tinco wrote: post #267
pfdietz wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not. Nowhere has it done well. It's just too complex with too many interdependent parts. Construction has proved to be beyond the competency of those trying to build plants. And now, it's just too late. The iteration time for nuclear designs is measured in decades, going up against renewable and storage technologies iterating in periods of a few years. Fusion would make fission look dead simple. If fission reactors c…

It was an honest question. I don't know which specific regulations, I've never built one but I have heard those who did lament the cost and trouble in even obtaining a site. From what I can see fission reactors are doing just fine in France and Belgium. I don't know the specific numbers but the French don't seem worse off economically, despite having the greenest grid on the planet. Fission has a number of disadvanta…

It was a leading question, pretending to claim that regulation was the cause. Nice walkback, though.

Nuclear is in a bad state in France. Their recent attempts to build new reactors have gone massively over budget. Existing reactors are aging and it looks like they cannot replace them.

Fission has some disadvantages over fusion, but those disadvantages won't make fusion cheaper than fission (the costs of fuel and waste disposal for fission are minor compared to other costs.) Fusion is inherently much lower in power density than fission, which will make the nuclear island much more expensive to build. It will require a minor miracle for fusion to be competitive with fission, never mind the cheaper sources of energy that are beating fission.

> Tokamak Energy is building its third iteration in 12 years,

They haven't built a fusion reactor. They have built experiments that are smaller and less complex that what a fusion power plant would have to be. Small fission reactors iterated well too; they weren't commercial power plants.

The chance that we have thousands of fusion reactors all over the world in the next 20 years is indistinguishable from zero.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#277

Post by sir_bearington »

pfdietz wrote: post #274
sir_bearington wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not "worst case we spent a bit more". Total global lithium ion battery production amounts to less than one hour of storage for the United States alone . Things like pulleys and synthetic methane remain in the prototyping stage. By this logic why not just use fusion? It's possible. We don't know which exact approach we'll use (lasers, magnets, etc.). We don't know how cheap it'll be, but hey it'll happen even…

No, it is "worst case we spend a bit more". We absolutely know that storage is possible. Pumped thermal electricity storage, for example, uses only well understood technologies. We solve climate change by raising CO2 costs high enough. Again, this is not a go-no go thing, it is just haggling over the price. > We're already at the point where markets are starting to see saturation with renewables. This just means CO2…

No, pumped storage is not feasible. It's both geographically limited, and it's not available at the appropriate scale. Estimates for how much storage would be necessary for renewables to work range from 12 hours to weeks of storage depending on the solar and wind mix. The US has ~25GWh of hydroelectric storage. There are no active hydroelectric storage projects at the moment, only proposals [1]. This is why proposals to decarbonize through intermittent sources always assume a nearly-free mechanism of energy storage.

It's easy to make renewables look cheap if you assume some wundertech makes storage free. Will thermal storage, synthetic methane, or who knows what else fulfill this need? Who knows, but they don't yet. Thus renewables only present a solution coupled with an engineering breakthrough. It's like assuming moore's law held true and developed an app that assumed it'd run on a 1THz single-core processor presumably developed a decade in the future. Seems reasonable in 1995, but that's have been a very bad bet.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectric...

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#278

Post by fredgrott »

something interesting from biology that no one is aware of...

plants that do photosynthesis can be stacked if they are different enough to grab different parts of the visual spectrum...it happens in oceans and tropics etc.

metal only get's electron excited in the uv light range and thus cannot be stacked.

Vertical farms do not stack those plants that grab different areas of visible spectrum as plants generally are dominant in one visible spectrum area more than the other one..red vs blue vs green

whereas algae specialize by the visible spectrum they grab for photosynthesis ie red, blue, and green algae...color reflected form them is not the color they use to photosynthesis ie red algae do not use red but a different color to photosynthesis

We are doing it wrong

we should build a bio-battery film of different algae and stack them to generate electricity from the sun instead of metal solar panels. Even transparency and other improvements only gets solar to 45% effectiveness...with algae we could get much higher

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#279

Post by jobe_br »

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…

Nevermind that land used for energy often isn’t suitable for farming, so … even with the hypothesis, limited as it is, it’s flawed.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#280

Post by jesstaa »

> These companies are profitable, but only because the process relies on a supply of cheap fossil fuels. If solar panels supplied the energy, the extra costs and space for the energy supply would again cancel out the savings in terms of space and costs.

Given that solar has become so cheap that new solar is able to compete with existing fossil fuel power this conclusion seems outdated. Solar can be placed in many places where it's not possible to plant in to the ground and it also doesn't account for power from other renewable energy sources that aren't available to plants in a field ie. Wind and Hydro

Post reply on HN