I very seriously doubt this. Here's a video from 8 years ago from Australia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFxF3VpzdLY
Growing wheat in a greenhouse is going to have enormous capital and other costs. If this article was serious they would have posted the costs.
Of course, the use of green power is positioned as an unalloyed good. No mention is made of the fact that every electron used is taken away from the transition from fossil fuels. We're losing ground here, not gaining it.
We're supposed to forget that the goal is to increase green energy production, not enormous new energy sinks.
"Just use green power" isn't the get-out-of-thermodynamics-free card people think it is.
If you replace outdoor crops with forests, they'll sequester much more CO2.
In principle you can replace many acres of outdoor crops with one acre of greenhouse crops: with electric illumination you can make plants grow during nighttime, and with controlled temperature you they can also grow during the winter.
Irrigation also needs much less water in a greenhouse (because plants lose a lot of water via transpiration, and in a humid environment they transpire less). Not to mention that you can recycle the water in a greenhouse.
Irrigation is a big component of the energy expenditure of crops, but not the only one. All other components will decrease. Fertilizer, pesticides, tilling: you just don't need huge tractors to go miles and miles to the fields. You can have much smaller machines doing the job on the spot.
I'm not saying greenhouses are the solution to all the world's problems, but they shouldn't just be discarded outright.
For example think of Sudan. Most of the current supplies need to be shipped by ship and then expensively transported inland.
But Sudan has lots of sunlight.
But on the other hand there is lots of sunlight for solar.
Plants also don't use the light while they are just sprouting. Plants don't use light after you harvest them. And most importantly, plants don't use light where they are not.
If you have vast areas of desert, you can mount lots of solar panels. Lots of places are somewhat between pure Dunes-type desert and Ukrainian-type super fertile chernozem. In a semi-desert place, you might be better off just installing solar panels and building indoor farms. Think of places like Arizona, or Nevada, or, why not, Sudan.
[1] https://bioslighting.com/grow-light-spectrum-led-plants/grow...
I can't imagine the production being more energy efficient than a regular field, but it sure saves space. I can imagine places like Singapore would benefit greatly since it could produce food locally.
I personally think grains will not be economical indoors this decade, or maybe even next, but in some not very distant future, the majority of the agricultural products will be produced indoors, just like chickens are now. Of course, when that time will come, indoor farming will be perceived as bad, horrendous, anti-nature, etc, just like people perceive the industrialized chicken farms now.
1) you still have to use actual soil and thats full of bugs and organisms already
2) if you aren't fertilizing you won't get anywhere near the yield farmers do and you won't be competitive on cost.
Harvesting will still require the use of whatever harvesting technology there is. If we can't competitively build grain harvesters with electricity outdoors its unlikely that you'll be able to do the same indoors. You'll notice no pictures or description of how they harvest - they aren't doing it by hand and they don't say its by electricity, and even if it is do you think the sun provides more energy for free over the life of the crop vs the one time its harvested?.
This doesn't seem very interesting as it stands now.
In theory it's possible to run completely free of insects, with cleanroom-like precautions, and I think some facilities do. I think it's more common to live with some level of insect pests though, since it's so hard to avoid introductions and so destructive when they occur--with no natural predators, they can multiply far faster than in nature. That implies some level of pesticides, deliberately introduced predatory insects (which are particularly effective indoors, since they can't fly away), etc.
So to grow the crops indoors we need to use at least 2.5x as much land.
The sun is not a source of emissions, so why spend time and money replacing it?
On the other hand, wind power would not use up cropland, and the solar panels could be on non-crop land, or water. Stacked grow trays might be more efficient to operate on.
The new Frankenstein rice that does CD4 photosynthesis, and also makes carotenes, seems like a good choice to grow in them. Maybe it can be persuaded to make protein, in the bargain.
I've heard that 1 m^2 of modern solar panels will support >1 m^2 of a low-light crop (like lettuce, unlike grain) under modern LEDs. I haven't done the math myself, and this obviously varies with climate. I think vertical farms (growing entirely by artificial light) are still uneconomic vs. greenhouses almost everywhere, per my other comment here. Supplemental artificial light in a greenhouse is of course highly economic in many climates, and Dutch growers have been using it for decades.
The cost to heat or cool a vertical farm should be lower than for a greenhouse with equivalent growing area, since it's got lower surface-area-to-volume ratio and doesn't need to be transparent. That may be important for stuff like high-end strawberries, where tight control of the day-night temperature swing enables higher sugar content. I again wouldn't expect a useful benefit for grains, though.
Vertical factory farms make a ton of sense here.
The economics for grain are much worse--the plants need much more light, and the product is easily dried, stored, and transported. The processing is also highly automated already. Here's an article with some (dismal) numbers: