Finnish company makes food appear from thin air
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
Edit: Found an interview with the founder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Iv0857U3UE. Basically the idea seems to be to grow bacteria and use them for food instead of plants. Bacteria can probably be grown much more efficiently than plants can, so that saves on a bunch of resources.
This is equivalent of cultivating plants in a hydroponic system and using leds to illuminate them. Plants make food that appear from thin air.
The problem is that unless you can sell the product at a high price, the cost of the electricity is too high. So it is used in very special cases, not for staple food.
Protein production by raising cows to make beef is incredibly expsensive on every axis you measure, (though this is not reflected in the price paid at the register, as environmental costs are externalized and there is a huge subsidy). It takes ~25 times as many resources to make 1g of beef protein compared to 1g of soy protein.
I'm not aware of the specifics of this process, but it's not unthinkable that it could be 100x as efficient as prevalent systems per 1g of protein produced (or that a future version of it, once perfected).
Also, in some places (e.g. in iceland, and in many places near dams) electricity is effectively use-it-or-lose-it free after sunk costs; Sounds like -- if electicity is the expensive factor in this -- another use for this essentially free energy; e.g. iceland exports this energy as aluminum, could also export it as protein.
For carbohydrates, I think the best plants are potatoes and corn (IIRC wheat and rice have lower efficiency).
For proteins, the best plants are soy and chickpeas. They actually host bacteria to fix the nitrogen to produce the proteins.
Even for "free" electricity, there are many uses. Like making Aluminum or mining Bitcoins. (And there was a recent post about using the surplus of electricity to make metallic iron, and then burning the iron, but I'm not sure if it makes economic sense.) You can use the profits in a reforestation program to capture the CO2.
Huh... Literally from "thin air".