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>We don't need to move lettuce production into buildings, mines or submarine farms. Food crops in general absolutely, some like lettuce could actually benefit
by ryanmercer 8y ago
>We don't need to move lettuce production into buildings, mines or submarine farms.
Food crops in general absolutely, some like lettuce could actually benefit from being done indoors though as you could limit exposure to things like E. coli compared to traditionally grown lettuce.
Growing in a largely enclosed system also allows you to prevent runoff, use the least amount of water possible, control all environmental variables etc BUT unless we suddenly develop fusion today and magically start bringing hundreds of fusion plants online a year, using the sun is always going to be more efficient than grow lights.
- Retric 8y agoEconomically that’s true, but ignoring capital costs... LED’s are up to 50% efficient. The best Solar is hitting 44% effecency. So, we can only keep ~22% of the energy from sunlight. However, plants are green because they only absorb a subset of sunlight. So, by designing LED’s that only emit the light best collected by plants you can get fairly close to 1:1 and theoretically you could see a net gain. Thus, 100 years from now things might flip. Further, we can stick solar panels many places we can’t effecently farm. It’s still going to stay very niche, such as producing ultra high grade produce for high end restaurants.
- namlem 8y agoWe could potentially supplement the LEDs with fiber optics that deliver natural sunlight underground.
- 00N8 8y agoI think you're exactly right here in the same vein, vertical farming stuff like this could become appealing if we can design solar panels that function in an opposite (complementary) spectrum vs. plants