>The “farm” produces four harvests per year. With every harvest, enough wheat is grown to make one loaf of bread (580 grams), which has a cost of at least 345 euros.
>Calculated at a yield of 175 kilowatt-hours per square meter of solar panel per year, the indoor cultivation of 1 m2 of wheat requires 20 m2 of solar panels.
There is no way to produce enough solar panels to power that.
That is cereal crop agriculture, which can't be done in vertical farms anyways.
Stuff like this is targeted at vegetables and herbs. There are still scale problems, but nothing like the kind associated with cereal crops.
The main issue as I understand it is that the sun is free outdoors, so it is hard to justify the cost of the equipment for indoor LED horticulture.
Then why even bother? Just go straight for artificial starch synthesis then. The saved land can be used to produce everything else on agricultural land.
It sounds ridiculous that people are proposing to basically build an VR arcade for plants.
Plants benefit more from the intensity of light rather than a slightly preferable spectrum.
However, GP may be right about the conversion efficiency destroying any gains that you might get from re-emitting light in only those wavelengths. The energy conversion efficiency of even the most efficient LEDs seems to only be about 50%, with the rest emitted as heat. (Source: just a quick Google, so take with a grain of salt) And then you've got the solar panel efficiency on top of that, plus any necessary voltage conversion. Definitely quite a tough ask.
More plant growth and less loss to pests. But the sun is free and agricultural land is cheap, so I know of few plants (other than the obvious one) that are economical to grow this way.