Vertical farm cuts energy use 75 per cent by using sunlight
An excerpt from the New Scientist article:
A vertical farm built inside a greenhouse in Texas can produce hundreds of thousands of heads of lettuce with significantly less energy than usual.
“We’ve been able to combine the efficiencies of a greenhouse with the
density of a vertical farm,” says , the company’s CEO.
Andrew Beacham at Harper Adams University in the UK says if those
numbers are accurate, the system appears to be twice as efficient as a
regular greenhouse.
The new greenhouse has been operating since October 2022, with an aim to add six others that could produce as much as 2.7 million
kilograms of produce a year on the company’s 24-hectare site. Nearly
all of Eden Green’s produce currently goes to a Walmart distribution
centre across the street that supplies more than 400 stores in Texas and
Oklahoma. Produce still has to be trucked a few hundred kilometers to the stores, but Badrina points out those trips are much shorter than the
journey from farms in Yuma, Arizona, or Salinas, California – both more
than 1500 kilometres away – which currently supply most of the lettuce
in the US.