Re:Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding ver...
by JumpCrisscross on Friday April 28, 2023 @12:25PM
(#35743512)
> plants need lots and lots of sunlight
Plants are 1 to 3.5% efficient at turning light into stored energy [1]. Our worst cells clock in an order of magnitude higher [2]. It wasn't ridiculous to ask if we could capture energy on a roof, emit it in a wavelength favorable to photosynthesis, and engineer plants to be more efficient. That would permit one roof's solar energy to power ten floors' crops.
To my knowledge, everyone did the first, some did the second and nobody bothered with the third, rendering the entire enterprise kaput from the get go. (If you're capturing at 25%, emitting with losses into a system that itself has 1% efficiency, you're building a space heater, not a farm.)
Plants are 1 to 3.5% efficient at turning light into stored energy [1]. Our worst cells clock in an order of magnitude higher [2]. It wasn't ridiculous to ask if we could capture energy on a roof, emit it in a wavelength favorable to photosynthesis, and engineer plants to be more efficient. That would permit one roof's solar energy to power ten floors' crops.
To my knowledge, everyone did the first, some did the second and nobody bothered with the third, rendering the entire enterprise kaput from the get go. (If you're capturing at 25%, emitting with losses into a system that itself has 1% efficiency, you're building a space heater, not a farm.)
[1] https://www.britannica.com/science/photosynthesis/Photosyste...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-cell_efficiency