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I've called out most of the vertical farming stories on HN because the numbers simply weren't there. The growing cost was simply too high even if you were grow
by rmason 4y ago
I've called out most of the vertical farming stories on HN because the numbers simply weren't there. The growing cost was simply too high even if you were growing the highest value crops possible to ever make a return for investors.
However if in the future the price of electricity becomes almost free then it may be possible. I grew up in the sixties when the nuclear power industry promised power, 'too cheap to meter'. We may see it from either geothermal or fusion in the next twenty five years and it will be a true game changer.
- steve_adams_86 4y ago> if in the future the price of electricity becomes almost free I think about this sometimes. If you could eventually throw a fusion reactor somewhere and build some crazy huge vertical farms around it, regulate their temperature with geothermal energy, maybe even produce your own nitrogen since the energy is so cheap and you're going to use a heap of the stuff, etc... You could probably make it cheaper, faster, and more efficient in the long term than regular farming. Outputs could be so fast, reliable, and high quality that over say, 25 years you'd never skip a beat due to environmental conditions (barring serious disasters), your automation investments would pay off like crazy, and your outputs would scale so much better than traditional farms that you'd outsell them significantly. But that's an insane requirement. At this point it's like saying "Imagine if we had magic, and we could use it to make a business that's physically impossible at the moment". Cool, but... Why?