Building a close to the city, colocated flour, and/or cereal factory under the wheat farm, allowing gravity to help build automations would reduce holistic costs. I wonder if that makes this farming method profitable?
Growing a metric ton of wheat with 100% supplemental light requires 150,000-400,000 kwh. That's $3,000 to $8,000 in electricity costs at 2 cents per kwh (very cheap) and would require electricity to generate about a gram of CO2 per kwh at the most to be better in terms of CO2 emissions.
If you have free, non-polluting electricity it would be better to use it to synthesize fuel for trucks to carry grain from the fields, or to capture CO2 from the air.
There are other inputs to growing outdoors: fertilizer usage, water usage, and insecticide/pesticide usage (likely not an exhaustive list). In a controlled environment like an indoor farm the use of each of those is dramatically less than in traditional farming. It would be worthwhile to include all of the inputs of growing food since light and transportation are not the full list.
(disclosure: I work for an indoor, vertical farming company)
Some back of the envelope calculations: From [1] the cost of fertilizer is like $150/acre and from [2] you can get about 7 tons/acre, so it's like $40/ton. The numbers change a lot from source to source, so let's multiply that by 2, and we get $40 of fertilizer per ton.
So in the impossible best scenario where the indoor production saves you the 100% of the fertilizer, you save $40 per ton of fertilizer that is much less that the $3000 per ton of electricity for illumination.
[1] https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2017/07/fertilizer-costs-i...
[2] https://www.seedcorn.com/resources/estimating-corn-silage-yi...
As you said, simply finding ways to reduce the cost (in $ and CO2) of transporting field grown wheat is probably better than co-locating a vertical farm.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/675822/average-prices-us...
In theory the energy intensity of bitcoin should go down over time because the block reward is shrinking. Of course transaction fees could rise but processing transactions is different to wasting energy to mint a currency out of thin air. Paying transaction fees is like paying your taxi driver. It's expensive but it's absolutely necessary to get a ride.
The sun provides about 300W/m^2 on average at temperate climates, that's 7.2kwh per day. Wheat takes about 4 months to grow and nuclear power costs 0.77c/kwh.
That's 665.28$/m^2 at wholesale.
[0] https://ag.tennessee.edu/solar/Pages/What%20Is%20Solar%20Ene....
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing#Price_comp...
But this would probably only halve theoretical costs, and then there are all the losses in the power production chain...
Immediate second order effect would be the obsolescence of grain futures, you don't need to hedge against a bad harvest. You probably also wouldn't need to go into debt to buy enough seed to plant each season.
Another would be a more elastic supply chain without the need for storage/buffering, which we've seen drastically reduce prices and increase production for all sorts of widgets using just-in-time manufacturing. If you can scale up/down wheat production pretty reliably with only 70-80 days forecasting, you can eliminate a lot of the inefficiencies of the food supply chain.
Sidenote, a literal vertically integrated bakery would be a sight to behold
To grow 1000 pounds would require an area 26 ft by 26 ft.
For a product worth less than $1000.
Counting space, heat, light, equipment - doesn’t sound like a paying proposition.
From the appendix¹ (assuming I am reading this right):
Value of production 405,329$/year
Cost of energy 15,987,286$/year
Area of field for equivalent yield 6,333,272m²
Land Area Required for PV Array 4,157,293m²
¹ https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2020/07/22/200265511...Wait...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/plants-versus-pho...
Chewing on bark will work, if you have enough bark, but it’s significantly more effective to use a fungus as an intermediary.
The cost of steam turbines and generators alone would prevent nuclear plants from producing power at 1/10th the cost of current plants. I don't think you're going to find a nuclear component of the plant that costs negative dollars.
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#early-days
[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb7tAwNIvUs&feature=youtu.be
These turnkey contracts cost the nuclear vendors a lot of money, and they moved away from them for that reason. Only in the last wave did Westinghouse go back to these kinds of contracts, and it drove them to bankruptcy.
regulations were changed retroactively as well, for already approved projects.
Ill look around for better links to clarify this.
And I explained why that was misleading. They were being sold at a loss. The PRICE was competitive with coal, but the cost was not. This was even before changes in regulations.
Can you point me on where to look for the price/cost distinction in early nuclear? I was not able to find definitive info there.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/the-n...
See also
The Turnkey Era in Nuclear Power, H. Stuart Burness, W. David Montgomery and James P. Quirk, Land Economics Vol. 56, No. 2 (May, 1980) (available through JSTOR)
The latter is interesting, as it also gives an explanation for why utilities might have liked non-turnkey contracts: any escalation of capital cost can be (and very often was) passed on to ratepayers. In light of this, what really nailed the first US nuclear age was the passage in 1978 of PURPA, particularly the part about non-utility suppliers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Utility_Regulatory_Poli...
As for turnkey contract, interestingly, other industries trying to avoid uncertainty and not pass costs to consumers.
AFAIK, Russian nuclear contracts come with warranty of all funding, so if overrun happens, these are Rosatom problem, not customer's
My point is that with cheaper than coal it becomes viable co2-less source of energy for,among other things, vertical farming.
it will allow growing regardless of the weather and clouds above.
First, plants lose about half the energy because of spectrum. There's lots of other losses (e.g. light falling on parts of the plant other than chloroplasts) but they apply to artificial light, too. And then, plants use only about 10% of the mid-day energy after all of these losses, because of saturation effects, but more the rest of the day-- we'll call it like 25% here. So that 50% factor and 25% factors multiplied are what you can try to exceed == 12.5%.
Cheap solar panels are about 15% efficient. So you're not going to beat direct sunlight by much.
That comment is using numbers that are overly optimistic. Using 22% panels requires you to construct an unaffordable PV facility for $400 million for a single vertical farm. If you go with lower efficiency panels you might be able to make it cost effective but then you are also consuming more land than a conventional farm. There is also a mismatch in energy demand. Solar panels only work while the sun is up but the yield promises of vertical farms entirely depend on 24/7 lighting.
Of course, this obviously depends on you making money on the wheat or other crops.