24 ms·

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 a

• nfin 6y ago
  One more thing it saves: Transportation (!) from miles away, as a skyscraper could feed a city or a part of it.
• cbmuser 6y ago
  Yeah, don’t bother with reading articles that exclude the largest source of clean energy in US. Such articles have an ideological bias.
  • tomcooks 6y ago
    No problem with nuclear until you have a problem, then it's a catastrophe
  • throwaway894345 6y ago
    They might have an ideological bias, but if the prevailing ideology is anti-nuclear then ignoring that bias isn't going to get you very far. Biden has committed us to moving the energy sector off of carbon in the next 15 years, which means we're going to build a lot of $CleanEnergy really soon, and if the ideological landscape doesn't change it very likely will be a whole lot of solar and wind (what is 15 years minus the amount of time it takes to build out a nuclear power plant?).
    • brohee 6y ago
      > what is 15 years minus the amount of time it takes to build out a nuclear power plant? If the last European projects are to be taken as models, it's a negative number (Olkiluoto 3 started in 2005 and not online before next year at best...). Not better for Flamanville 3, maybe Hinkley Point C will be achieved a bit faster...
  • pfdietz 6y ago
    Yeah, ideologically biased like the President of Exelon (quoted from December 2018): “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
• tux1968 6y ago
  The other thing to remember is that there is a lot of land that isn't suitable for farming for one reason or another that can be used for solar.
  • airza 6y ago
    It's such an important point that's the core value proposition of vertical farming. Arable.land is unlikely to keep up with the combination of population growth and climate change. That's the whole point of the exercise! Solving that problem!
    • xchaotic 6y ago
      Not solving it unless you solve the other problems such as where the energy comes from how do you deal with waste where do you get the water from.
    • Shivetya 6y ago
      doubtful, as little far back as a decade there was considered to be over 2.7 billion hectares of land available that would was considered usable, this is mostly in areas like South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Central America. Global Warming may actually open areas previously unsuited for certain crops; evidence pointed to much warmer climates in Europe with grapes further North in mans short existence, and the impact on existing uses is not fully understood. The simple fact is, every time someone suggest were are running out of food or have too many people or water is not wet anymore we find out that it simply is because we don't look further than we are standing. The biggest reason people starve today is repressive governments that respect neither the person or private property. that one percent, the ruling elite of the world, loses its grip in highly informed, rights driven parts of the world but they sure do fight to keep the pie to themselves even there.
    • wongarsu 6y ago
      World popolation is around 7.8 billion, and is projected to peak around 11 billion. Given that of all agricultural land only 23% is used for non-feed crops (producing 82% of global calorie supply) that doesn't sound like an existential problem, even if you assume that climate change makes much more land unarable than it makes arable.
• marshray 6y ago
  Yes, please include the cost of nuclear power in the considerations. (The joke here is that the true cost is undefined because we here in the US have no method to store the long-term hazardous waste it produces. Current cleanup costs for just the military reactor waste are estimated at $500B, for civilian reactors the costs are said to be higher.)
  • Hammershaft 6y ago
    In the short term nuclear energy is expensive, but in the long term nuclear energy is one the cheapest sources of energy available. Source - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY (this is even more true when you consider the cost of externalities)
    • marshray 6y ago
      We're a century into nuclear reactor technology. Today is the long term, and the costs are still uncontrolled.
    • dale_glass 6y ago
      I don't see how nuclear can win over the long term. Solar and wind are simple and very amenable to mass production. Many parts of them are usable for other purposes -- we need generators for things other than windmills, inverters for things other than solar powerplants, etc. This means we're not making things as a one off, but doing mass manufacturing, and the different users all reap benefits. They're easy to produce, which means there's lots and lots of competition, which pushes down price. They're easy to install, scale and maintain. They're easy to iterate, because it doesn't take billions to test a new design on a small scale. They don't need most of the parts nuclear has -- if you think of it a windmill contains parts a nuclear plant needs too, but unlike nuclear doesn't have all the nuclear stuff along with it, which isn't cheap. The way I see it, nuclear could have been successful but is going the way of the mainframe -- today mass computing is done on huge amounts of commodity hardware, and in the same way large, purpose built plants are already being overtaken by mass production of panel after panel being churned out of a factory, and that's not going to get any better for nuclear.
• kumarski 6y ago
  Way overshooting the confidence on fusion here.
  • labster 6y ago
    Fusion is still 20 years away.
  • hobofan 6y ago
    Yeah, last time I checked everyone was still on the "viable fusion is constantly 20 years away" meme.
  • martimarkov 6y ago
    It’s like 20 years away!!
  • kristopolous 6y ago
    It's placing something that quite literally simply does not exist on the balance sheet. A physicist who died 55 years ago said it'd be commercially deployed by 1975. 1954 was the "too cheap to meter" claim by an investment banker who worked for the Truman administration. That's still quoted today, said 2 years before Elvis debuted on Ed Sullivan. We're all supposed to treat it like it's a valid opinion. While instead, 46 years after the predicted free energy for all bonanza, rate payers are getting hit with taxes to keep nuclear going. It's in practice, in actual reality, a more expensive option. Continue to research. March on with science, sure. But as a matter of public policy and planning, relying on it is pure fantasy. I don't know why hn is so koolaid-drunk on this stuff. It's a cult with 70 years of failed predictions. It's apparently like any other cult where wrong predictions make the true believers even more fanatical. We're amidst planet altering climate change, this is really not the time to fuck around.
• Retric 6y ago
  Commercial nuclear takes up a lot of space, to the point where replacing it with solar is surprisingly close. For example the the Brunswick nuclear power plant in North Carolina, covers 1,200 acres or 4,860,000 square meters for 1,858 MW = 382 w/m2. It’s stated lifetime capacity factor is 75% which is much higher than solar, but that’s ignoring the long construction and decommissioning process afterwards. You can find both higher and lower energy density examples, but I personally was surprised how close they where.
  • mytailorisrich 6y ago
    That's the whole land belonging to the site, most of which is nature, not the plant itself, which looks like less than 200 acres, including the car parks. In any case, it's not close at all either for that specific example or in general, not least considering that a nuclear plant can produce 24/7 and that solar often does not reach peak production because of the weather. "A solar PV facility must have an installed capacity of 3,300 MW and 5,400 MW to match a 1,000-MW nuclear facility’s output, requiring between 45 and 75 square miles. For comparison, the District of Columbia’s total land area is 68 square miles." [1] [1] Nuclear Energy Institute @ https://www.nei.org/news/2015/land-needs-for-wind-solar-dwarf-nuclear-plants https://www.nei.org/news/2015/land-needs-for-wind-solar-dwar...
    • Retric 6y ago
      Look through several nuclear locations and ~1000 acres is fairly typical. In theory they could be more compact, but security concerns etc means nobody puts 2GW of nuclear on a 200 acre site. 1,000 acres, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_Valley_Nuclear_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_Valley_Nuclear_Power_St... 1,782-acre, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Nuclear_Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Nuclear_Generating_Stati... 2,767 acres https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callaway_Nuclear_Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callaway_Nuclear_Generating_St... for just 1,190 MW. Some are significantly more compact for example 391-acre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catawba_Nuclear_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catawba_Nuclear_Station, but that’s surrounded by water.
• skissane 6y ago
  > If we look into the relatively near future, fusion energy is going to account for a rapidly increasing share of energy production by the end of this decade. I really don't think by the end of this decade there will be any commercial fusion production. I'm sure we will be closer but it is still some decades away. ITER proposes to follow up their current research reactor with a successor (DEMO) which they plan to start building around 2040 and begin operating in the 2050s. Then they expect DEMO to be followed by their first commercial power station, PROTO. They probably won't even start building PROTO until the 2050s or 2060s, so we could easily be looking at 2070-2080 before it comes online. Now, there are other teams working on fusion, there is always the possibility some other team could leapfrog ITER. It is also possible that with increased investment timelines might come forward. But I'm very confident that come 2030, the amount of fusion power in the commercial energy markets is going to still be zero.
  • benjaminjackman 6y ago
    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 improving the efficiency of fusion. The remaining use cases for solar would probably then be on small off-grid type situations.
    • gh02t 6y ago
      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.
      • benjaminjackman 6y ago
        That's interesting, do you think that SPARC and HTS advancements like for example VIPER cables point towards a faster path to market for fusion than ITER?
• pier25 6y ago
  Woah great video. Thanks for sharing!
• cosmodisk 6y ago
  Don't know how old you are but it's very likely that your children or their children will get old before fusion energy becomes reality.
  • pfdietz 6y ago
    I don't think competitive fusion power will ever be a reality, unless one is talking about fusion in the core of the Sun.
• the-dude 6y ago
  Fusion is 30 years away, not 10. Always has been.
• bparsons 6y ago
  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.
• felipellrocha 6y ago
  A lot people miss this point, so thank you for bringing it up. It drives me nuts that it's so prevalent out there!
• glenstein 6y ago
  >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.
• jobe_br 6y ago
  Nevermind that land used for energy often isn’t suitable for farming, so … even with the hypothesis, limited as it is, it’s flawed.
  • monkeycantype 6y ago
    Yes this could save a lot of arable or environmentally significant land, even if it didn't save a net m^2
  • TheCoelacanth 6y ago
    Less suitable than empty air 10 feet above the ground? How is vertical farming powered by solar panels better than building the same artificial growing environment at ground-level and powering it with sunlight?
    • trickstra 6y ago
      Because you can put the solar panels above a parking lot. You can't directly compare land area for growing with land area for solar panels, qualitatively, they are two very different lands. We have more of the latter.
• Justsignedup 6y ago
  to add: - 95%+ reduction in water usage - no need for any pesticides because... boom no pests - no need for any other treatments to reduce disease - can be powered in any way - does not need to have complex freight Sure it doesn't "save space" if you make a ton of win/solar farms. Sure. But its not about saving space as much as solving a huge logistics problem, water problem, pesticide problem, and even the taste problem (food harvested recently will taste better than frozen food transported for weeks/months)
• offtop5 6y ago
  Why can't you just open the windows. I'm imagining some victorian-like device which reflects sunlight around indoors
• chongli 6y ago
  It also doesn't take water into account. You can build solar panels in a desert and send the power over high-voltage DC lines with minimal losses. Trying to pump water into the desert and grow food outdoors, with constant losses due to evaporation, is far less efficient. You also need to bring in fertilizer, fuel to operate equipment, workers, and fuel to ship the harvest back out of the desert to bring it to market.
• agitator 6y ago
  Even so, how does free sunlight with longer transport compare to the cost of electricity with short transport. I imagine electricity, regardless of source, is still the most expensive factor.
• noetic_techy 6y ago
  I came here to point out nuclear and fusion also. Lets say you can get the energy cost to near zero, the the 200+ euros left per meter sq could be cut down by looking for construction or scaling efficiencies and even the fact that if energy is near zero from nuclear or fusion power, it might end up lowering construction costs if it can be diverted into use in heavy machinery. I'd love to see this same experiment powered by a small Thorium prototype reactor.
• grawprog 6y ago
  Not only that, but, even if we were just talking straight solar, solar panels don't have to be built on arable land. There's a lot more land available for building solar panels than there is available arable farmland.
• kragen 6y ago
  Nuclear energy is the Amiga of energy sources. Ahead of its time, it was unjustly rejected and persecuted by the ignorant masses. Its advocates are bonded by the quiet pride that at least they weren't unthinkingly siding with those masses. (And they're right!) Meanwhile, as the Amiga stagnated for terribly unfair reasons, other, scrappier technologies like the i386 and UMG-Si grew from being worthless boondoggles (except in special circumstances, like spaceflight) to being actually far better and cheaper. But the Amiga advocates keep the faith, sharing their suffering and resentment. They inevitably try the alternatives a little and perhaps even start to like them. Gradually their denial recedes, decade by decade. But they know that however much fab costs go down and leave their beloved Amiga behind in the dust, you'll never be able to run nuclear submarines and Antarctic research stations on solar panels.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• coldtea 6y ago
  >fusion energy is going to account for a rapidly increasing share of energy production by the end of this decade Like it did "by the end" of 4-5 previous decades... It's the perennial "soon" technology...
• amarant 6y ago
  It's also ignoring that there are places that are suitable for solar but not suitable for farming. Take the Sahara desert for example, lots of sun, a solar farm would thrive! Now try planting something there....
• Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Fusion sounds great in theory, but even if they manage to make it viable, it'll cost billions to create even one plant, and how much power does it produce theoretically? I mean if I put on my idealist sci fi glasses, I can see a future where we have infinite energy for free, in which case we will see a lot more energy-wasteful endeavours like vertical farms, air conditioning and cryptocurrencies. But we're not there yet, and we won't be there yet for a long time. Energy production, also with renewables, increases year over year, but keeping right on it is energy consumption. Examples from my own country. We're building big wind farms in the North Sea. But at the same time, Google and co are building data centers that use up a lot of their capacity already. And another thing happening at the same time is a push to reduce our dependency on natural gas for heating and cooking (because emissions and international politics / dependency on Russia). And the other push is towards electric vehicles. So thirst for electricity only goes up, probably faster than new energy sources can be built (renewable or otherwise). This trend will continue, wouldn't be surprised if electricity consumption will double in the next decade.
• ozim 6y ago
  Author also makes mistake because he assumes all land to be equal. Then second assumption is that power source has to be in the same place as the farm. Vertical farm can be set up in a place where normal farm would not be possible. One can also imagine that solar panels can be placed on a piece of land that would not be suitable for growing crops. There is loads of empty land on the world. Land that is worth a lot is close to where all people are and in places where it is fertile and ideally flat.
• TomSwirly 6y ago
  A YouTube video is not the ne plus ultra of scientific presentations, you know. I remember the first time that someone was telling that fusion would be producing a lot of power by the end of the decade, but I can't remember whether this was the 70s or the 80s. Considering that humans have yet to produce one joule of net energy from fusion, and the longest anyone has ever run a fusion reactor was 20 seconds, I think you're wildly optimistic. Indeed, I would say that if America today had working plans for a commercial fusion power plant handed to it by benevolent aliens, between a deliberately broken bureaucracy and the awesome power of the fossil fuel industry, I would be quite surprised if the first plant opened by January 1, 2030. (And I'd suspect that literally billions of kickbacks and graft would have to be paid for the gatekeepers to allow it in.) (Other more rational, less kleptocratic countries might do better - I'm looking at you, Germany - and paradoxically, fully authoritarian states might also do better.)
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]