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Comment by pvaldes | Hacker News Reader

"aims to produce" is not the same thing as "produces"

This is another in a long, long series of breathlessly promoted "urban"/"vertical" farming concepts. In virtually every case the description is projection. The economies rarely work out except for leafy greens in extremely dense urban regions without reliable access to countryside or greenhouse options.

... or locally grown organic super-fresh superfood greens for a major tourist economy like Las Vegas?

It could work for niche stuff, but energy costs is always what kills these ideas for the mainstream market. Sunlight is free. If we had Mr. Fusion maybe it could work.

Edit: I suppose it could work in the Middle East too where energy may be cheap enough (solar, cheap gas) vs. the cost of shipping it from Europe or further away.

It's true, this might be one of the optimal markets for this kind of farming. You're right about the other niches. There will be a few. Blueberries in Brooklyn. Us hipsters need our avocado toasts and rare fruit brunches in all seasons.

With unlimited power, everything changes. We get the incredible luxury of scientifically produced vegetables. They can be optimized to perfection in harmony with consumer tastes. Every season brings a new designer crop...

Well, maybe it could happen without unlimited power. We can dream.

Yes. I must also add that Las Vegas and Dubai are in areas with tremendously abundant year round solar power. There is rarely even a cloud in the sky. When the sun is up these days upwards of 40% of the power in Southern California can be solar. Not sure about Nevada but the potential is definitely there.

http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx

Around noon PST you'll see upwards of 11GW of solar. (This includes rooftop installations if they have smart meters.)

Of course it's more efficient to just put the plant's leaves in the sun, but water isn't free either and you lose far more water that way. I wonder if cost of water in the desert could outrun the cost of indirect solar -> electricity -> calories? It could be true in the US Southwest, but it could definitely be true in Dubai or Saudi Arabia. In places like that desalination is one of the only sources of fresh water, and that's likely more energy intensive than indoor farming.

So yes it could work in a few markets, but it's not going to replace conventional agriculture broadly.

And "pound of produce" is an almost meaningless metric.

Yup; in additiona it needs e.g. calories per m2 and cost. In the article I see a lot of leaves (very low caloric count) with a lot of employees around it in lab coats - that just can't be profitable. It can't compete with thousands of acres of high-calorie products like corn or potatoes harvested by just one guy in a combine. At the moment (According to a quora post, https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-can-be-fed-year-round-...), right now we use 0.5 acres of farmland per person; I'm sure that can be optimized a bit so let's say 0.25 acres per person, or ~1000 m2. That's an area of 30x30 meters. The Empire State Building, to name a random example, is ~130x57 meters, or about 7500m2 (very rough calculation). Therefore, you can feed about 7.5 people per floor. Give or take, very rough back of the napkin calculation.

7.5 people per floor isn't a lot and it's very expensive. Maybe useful for colonizing Mars where money isn't that big of a deal, but definitely not feed-the-world level scaling.

Calories per m2 is not a useful metric, dollars per m2 is the appropriate one. They are not attempting to feed the world, they are attempting to get premium leafy greens to market quickly.

Accurate. Personal health has completely bypassed the calorie as a useful metric btw. You can't survive on a diet of 1,800 calories of vegetable oil per day

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