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Something I've never understood about those cool looking vertical farm concepts is water management. Doesn't it take a TON of energy to pump enough water to irr

• maxerickson 14y ago
  I checked the math on a post yesterday that compared the energy in a gallon of gas to the energy stored by 3500 gallons of water at a height of 1 kilometer. As far as I could see, the math was right. That doesn't account for pumping losses and all that, but it is a nice check on intuition (for reference, 1 gallon gas is equivalent to 33 kWh, ignoring our inability to extract that much useful energy).
• lotsofcows 14y ago
  They're supposed to be self contained. Top up water is collected from rain fall. No water is supposed to leave the building.
• ChuckMcM 14y ago
  One wonders if you can vaporize it at the bottom and condense it out of the air at the top, but yes there clearly would have to be some sort of energy input to move water. One could imagine a sort of bucket brigade kind of thing where water heading down, was collecting in buckets which were lifting a slightly lower mass of water up (or equivalent mass with a an energy injection to cover the difference). But I don't think anyone submitted these designs as practical farms, more like Farms that look futuristic at the expense of being implementable :-).
  • protomyth 14y ago
    California needs to put some effort behind desalination plants or else they will lose some of the most productive farms in the country and a whole wine industry.