Vertical farming, the best solution to support an ever growing population or just a scam?
IMHO it has a lot of potential but not being able to grow grains really is something that should be tackled sooner rather than later. But I could see this being used by self sustaining communities to provide lots of food while using very little space. And it's technically more environmentally friendly than just using vast stretches of land to produce the same amount of food.
Ah not really, just did the math a while ago with someone. I was arguing that it was inefficient and stupid to put a solar panel somewhere to generate electricity to grow plants with LEDs vs just putting the plants under the sun. We saw that not only was it actually possible energy-wise but if you take the limits of the efficiencies in terms of LEDs and solar panel you could barely stack two levels of plants. It was something like 5 years ago so I guess efficiency has raised since then.
One for one the efficiency improvement is not so great, but it allows extending the time of light availability, which can make a real difference in northern latitudes during winter time.