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Vertical farming does not save space

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Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#401

Post by Ma8ee »

e_y_ wrote: post #197
Ma8ee wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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-...

Why do you think that less than half the panels will receive sunlight? Also, panels are very cheap today, so their placement doesn’t mean to be optimal. I believe the cost per kWh will be cheaper with panels mounted vertically off the ground than building a roof to place them on.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#402

Post by jelliclesfarm »

hultner wrote: post #240
_carbyau_ wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding was that you put the solar in the desert, so that you can put the vertical farm somewhere else where soil, water, transport logistics is easier. So the question is whether a greenhouse/farm in the desert is easier than solar in the desert connected through grid to vertical farm somewhere else. I have no data. My guess is the ongoing logistics of piping electricity out of the desert is easier than fer…

It is, I’ve worked on large scale projects to enable farming in deserts using underground vertical farms.

Where can I learn more about these underground vertical farms in the deserts?

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#403

Post by Armisael16 »

klodolph wrote: post #367
Armisael16 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if this is what the previous poster was getting at, some there is some theoretical evidence that the absorption wavelengths used in photosynthesis are not tuned for maximum power input but for stable power input: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.12281 If this is the case it would be a motivation that is fundamentally very different than that of a multijunction solar cell.

I've read that paper, I didn't realize the comment was referring to that. > If this is the case it would be a motivation that is fundamentally very different than that of a multijunction solar cell. Solar cells are designed by humans with human motivations, and plants are "designed" by evolutionary processes which lack motivation entirely. Yet, in spite of this, there are astonishing similarities between the limitati…

I don’t see any meaningful similarities beyond ‘they absorb light at more than one frequency’. It doesn’t seem particularly fascinating to me; it’s patently obvious that if you absorb at two frequencies you should absorb at two different frequencies.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#404

Post by [deleted] »

Rapzid wrote: post #376
perl4ever wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>barring investment on the scale of the Manhattan project The Manhattan project cost about $30 billion in today's dollars, I believe. We have IPOs that raise close to that amount of money these days (e.g. Alibaba). It's half a percent of federal spending in 2020 (admittedly not a normal year). GameStop has lost over $30 billion from its peak valuation. Your matter of fact claim that there's not enough capital in toda…

Well, ITER will cost 22-65bn. It's much more ambitious than the Manhattan Project IMHO.

[deleted]

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#405

Post by gh02t »

perl4ever wrote: post #320
gh02t wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stars and fusion nuclear weapons exist. And I'm only half joking. The energy yield of fusion is there and the basic physics are pretty well understood. Progress has been agonizingly slow but steady. We generally understand what needs to be done to get there, but it's a slow and complicated process that will take a long time and several more expensive, large-scale tests like ITER to push it along. The payoff is still…

>barring investment on the scale of the Manhattan project The Manhattan project cost about $30 billion in today's dollars, I believe. We have IPOs that raise close to that amount of money these days (e.g. Alibaba). It's half a percent of federal spending in 2020 (admittedly not a normal year). GameStop has lost over $30 billion from its peak valuation. Your matter of fact claim that there's not enough capital in toda…

Comparing the raw numbers in terms of cost I don't think quite gives the right picture, you have to think about scale of investment. Whole (large) towns and biggest-in-the-world facilities were raised and the brightest minds committed. And it would likely take longer. Maybe a better comparison would be to the Manhattan project and the atomic weapons research apparatus in the decades that followed. Current input to fusion research is a big monetary investment worldwide, but I think in terms of effort it's not quite the same scale especially if you talk about the whole world committing to that degree.

I will add that I'm not sure it would be worth committing this amount of resources solely to fusion. Obviously I think it's worth pursuing long term, but not necessarily at that scale given the costs it would have in terms of other scientific research. I never claimed the amount of capital isn't there nor meant to imply it; it probably is possible (by 2040-2050, 2030 seems impossible to me) but not realistic barring some dramatic changes in the world.

Regarding why wouldn't Elon Musk be working on it... let's ignore that several other prominent billionaires have invested in fusion. But currently fusion is not an appealing private investment outside of philanthropy. There are a lot of up front costs and uncertainty for a payoff that is way down the road. Whether it's worth investing in is up to him, but "whether or not Elon Musk is doing it" is not a good measure of viability.

Regarding the comment that everybody in the know thinks breakeven is infeasible, that's certainly not the prevailing nor even a common view with the people I know working on fusion. Opinions are mixed on how far we are from breakeven and how far we are in terms of the technology required to achieve it, but as I noted previously the basic energy yield of fusion is there and the route to get there is mostly clear, if long. ITER has little cross-application with nuclear weapons, that would be facilities like NIF which aren't the main focus of research towards power production.

I'll add that I have no skin in this game, my research is unrelated to fusion I just happen to talk with those guys a lot and took some classes in grad school. I see none of those sweet gubbment fusion research bucks.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#406

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

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.

Far from it. After years of promotion, investment and development, wind and solar energy prices dropped 10-20x in the last decades. Same cost reduction can very well happen with nuclear power, and it'll take far less space than solar and wind, will disrupt the nature less, and will be much more reliable and predictable, capable of producing energy on demand and not requiring any storage.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#407

Post by Armisael16 »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #387
Armisael16 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand why those would preferentially help low yield crops more than high yield crops. That would be very surprising to me.

My thoughts: If a crop is easy to grow, that means it’s able to handle: 1. Variable sunlight conditions; 2. Variable water conditions; 3. Handle bugs, viruses; and 4. Variable climate conditions. Low yield crops are problematic because they cannot handle variability. Using an indoor facility is equally expensive if you program the conditions to be variable or to be relatively strict. Additionally, a low yield crop is…

> Low yield crops are problematic because they cannot handle variability.

Is this generally the cause for their lower yields? I would assume they just aren’t genetically programmed to grow as much (useful stuff, at least).

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#408

Post by gdubs »

One form of vertical farming that does save space is Agroforestry, in which traditional crops are grown in a system with trees. Plants have various solar requirements — some are shade tolerant. This means you can have crops, shrubs, trees, all occupying an area of land. This was first explored in the book Tree Crops: A permanent Agriculture, in the 1930s. If you lookup closely at that subtitle, you’ll see the roots of the word Permaculture.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#409

Post by selectodude »

southerntofu wrote: post #399
selectodude wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always kind of curious as this "expensive" line of thinking. Yes, nuclear is expensive. Extremely expensive. But is it more expensive than a week's worth of catastrophic grid collapse due to global warming? We have the ability to build nuclear plants. We can reprocess the waste to make more energy with. We can get better at it to drive down the price. It's more reliable as a base load than any renewable. My state…

> But is it more expensive than... Like you, i don't believe price to be an argument of concern. I'm merely stating this because over and over, both in French media and on HN, i've seen stated that nuclear is the cheapest energy which is a blatant lie. > We can reprocess the waste to make more energy with. Source? From my limited understanding, all nuclear research that produced either less-dangerous waste or re-usab…

>Source? From my limited understanding, all nuclear research that produced either less-dangerous waste or re-usable waste was shut down decades ago because there was no foreseeable way to turn that into weapons. The nuclear industry is deeply tied to the military industrial complex and (neo)colonial extractivism (see Françafrique networks for references).

The existence of La Hague site in northwest France has been very successful at nuclear reprocessing.

>Source? Here in France there's uncountable accidents/scandals in the nuclear industry and reactors are often stopped for weeks/months at a time. The same cannot be said about hydro power (dams) for instance.

It's not uncountable. There have been like ten in the entire country over the past fifty years.

>Don't you believe reducing our resources/energy footprint as a society is a more sustainable way to address the problem?

No. The one actual resource we can make and use is energy. We need to use less consumables. Energy isn't a consumable in our timeline. So many things are predicated on significant increases in clean energy. We could literally suck carbon out of the air with enough energy.

Re: Vertical farming does not save space

#410

Post by cecilpl2 »

officehero wrote: post #350
matkoniecz wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"First commercial fusion power station will start construction between 2050 and 2060" is mostly guess, but it is an educated guess based on some trends/predictions/achieved work. But compare it to "First commercial perpetum mobile power station will start construction between 2050 and 2060" or "First FTL spaceship will be launched in 2050s".

The educated guess for the last 50 years was 20-30 years away

This is mostly because it has not been funded to the level required for that timeline to be accurate.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._his...

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