With that long, cold Canada winter night, farmers will love that light bill.
“With that long, cold Canada winter night, farmers will love that light bill.”
what about the heat bill? unless they can co-locate these “indoor-farms” near output water heated by waste heat from power plants, I would think their heat bills would make all of this impractical. Or perhaps they just put them underground and the light bill is the main energy input after all.
Light from relatively efficient sources (LED shows promise) and warmth from tapping geothermal sources (by drilling a really DEEP shaft and using it as an injection well with a return pipeline) can mimic optimal growing conditions. The capital investment may be quite high, but savings in transportation costs, much more efficient use of labor and other operational inputs, and application of a number of known intensive farming techniques may make such farms a practical enterprise in the future. Placing them in a specifically designed high-rise structure, taking advantage of the waste heat that is all around in an intensely developed urban area, and with light conduction from the sun to the lower levels of the structure, may take the food production much closer to the population centers than is now the norm.
As the old fellow says, not farming nearly as well as I know how to.