The bottom line is that the energy to drive the growth comes from the sun via solar cell. The acetate stores & delivers the energy. We’ve invented a new form of photosynthesis.
It could be driven by nuclear generated electricity, allowing growth on cloudy days & at night, perhaps it is an improvement.
It’s a massive improvement. The electricity could come from any source. Wind turbines running full speed in the middle of the night when demand is low and wind is maxed out. Texas now routinely goes 100% wind powered at night with so much surplus ERCOT pays customers to take the power with negative rates. Nuclear could and should be used it is humanities densest energy source ever convinced. Turning inorganic CO2 , water and electricity to organic carbon energy is a huge deal it allows for the first time in history the cultivation of food crops completely decoupled from solar input using nuclear or geothermal energy sources humans could live underground indefinitely or on space ships in deep space far from the Sun. The density that this process brings is a breakthrough alone. Since no light is needed to grow food you can track and stack food production in high rise density barely imagined a few years ago. A single high rise building sized warehouse stacked floor to ceiling with grow tanks and trays would feed millions of humans. Using single celled algae,fungi and protein forming cell lines feed acetate even higher densities are possible where rather than trays growing plants such as rice or wheat or soy beans you have 50 foot tall tanks with hundreds of thousands of gallons of growing single cell organisms combining protein, carbohydrates, lipids and the B minerals those tanks could feed millions if not billions in a 1800 kcal a day complete ration. Using not a single ray of sunlight. A normal sized nuclear power plant of 1500 megawatts would feed millions of humans probably tens of millions of making human kibble like rations. The amounts of animal feed would be staggering too or better yet grow cellular cultures of meat cells using the acetate as an intermediary to glucose or some other 6 carbon sugar. No need for cattle which could be feed acetate directly. Grow cultured meat in tanks by the thousands of tonnes per tank , ground up in ground meat form it would be genetically identical to the animal it was biopsied from and would be ground meat just like any other ground meat product. In a chicken nugget or burger paddie one would not be able to tell the difference from cultured to slaughtered ground meat products. Any one of these advances is created by decoupling the growing of a food product from sunlight via electrical chemical synthesis. It is nothing short of a paradigm shift in thousands of years of agriculture and food production. NASA will be all over this as will every agency tasked with the continuance of government since growing food in bunkers is their first priority for long term continuance.