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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

If you're in a remote area, why not use a regular greenhouse?

Not all areas let you do this. I am talking about difficult remote, like mountain ranges, lighthouses, isles of the cost of Scotland etc. Not all remote means woods and fields around.

Greenhouses work all the way to the arctic circle. At which point your not going to be getting much energy from solar power. (One trick is to use reflectors to collect more sunlight then concentrate it onto a smaller area, same result as having solar power at a tiny fraction of the cost.) Other option is to use a lot of insulation then tilt the structure. ex: http://waldenlabs.com/5-northern-greenhouse-examples/

Further, solar power takes the same area as you can use to grow crops anyway.

FWIW Iceland gets about 4 hours of daylight near the winter solstice, not a generous amount to be sure. Still, it reduces the requirement for artificial illumination, and with "free" energy from geothermal sources it may be practical enough to grow under glass with supplemental LED illumination. Obviously most anywhere in the US will get more winter daylight which should make greenhouse culture easier to pursue.

Though I couldn't get the link you gave to cooperate, I have seen examples of cold weather greenhouse installations before, so I know that it can work.

You could get a wind power for example, that requires less quality space than solar.

Wind turnbines don't scale down very well. The intermittent nature is also a poor fit for growing plants without storage.

But, if you have excess power from a large turbine it could work.

PS: Solar has surprisingly high energy density. Try running some numbers for this stuff.

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