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Comment by Hextinium | Hacker News Reader

I would love to see a carbon analysis on the CO2 from the LED lighting vs the CO2 from freight transport of food.

Me too. Especially one accounting for all emissions end-to-end, and over a time frame of decades of use. While LEDs themselves are as dirty as the power source they're hooked up to[0], this doesn't count the energy used to produce and transport those LEDs and all other equipment. It's especially important because equipment breaks down, and a lot of it is designed to break down fast[1].

[0] - My mind races to imagine vertical or subterranean farms powered by a nuclear plant.

[1] - Also known as planned obsolescence. People are assholes.

1) I assure you that industrial LEDs are not 'designed to break down', their longevity is a key consideration for people buying them

2) What's the fetish with vertical farming? Productivity of a greenhouse is 10x to 100x of a conventional field. The key limitation is capital costs. Unless you are growing small plants like basil/strawberry, vertical farming doesn't make any sense. It balloons your CapEx, increases power consumption (sunlight) and you save land, which you have saved a lot of anyway just by going to greenhouse farming from normal fields. Do most folks not appreciate that most of the farmland we have is open field, we are not running out of space for greenhouses?

RE 1), I didn't mean that LEDs themselves would break down (unless soldered badly). But their controllers, or power converters, just might. Like with LED lightbulbs - most of them break very quickly due to cheap power & control components and/or bad soldering job causing thermal damage.

RE 2), fair. In my mind, I grouped vertical and rooftop farming together, and find them desirable in the sense of bringing back more plant life into the cities (and reducing last-mile transportation footprint). But you're right, in terms of general food production, they're not all that interesting or useful.

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