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Sure it's great for optimizing land use. Agricultural land is cheap. The real question is cost.
Yes, deserts are even cheaper than agricultural land. But that isn't the problem.
The problem is the upfront capital cost of building an underground greenhouse system, the solar panels and getting the water.
Yes, once you have all that, you can produce more efficiently than normal production. And in a couple of hundred years[1] you will actually be ahead.
[1] No, I haven't done the maths. Maybe it is 10 years, but the point is still the same. It's never going to produce the profits needed to make an investment of that magnitide[^1]
I think Las Vegas would be a great place for vertical farming. Heavy local demand, constrained water usage, cheap power, high ambient temperature. What's not to like?
The cost of building large 5+ floor concrete structures that can take significant floor loading in kilograms per square meter? Building vertical anything isn't cheap, this is why you see massive cloud scale datacenters built into "shell" warehouse buildings that are tilt-up concrete walls, the whole thing 1 story high sitting on a concrete slab. Usually in some places where land is cheap in $/square meter. Example: Datacenters in The Dalles, OR.
Quote:
Sure it's great for optimizing land use. Agricultural land is cheap. The real question is cost.
Yes, deserts are even cheaper than agricultural land. But that isn't the problem.
The problem is the upfront capital cost of building an underground greenhouse system, the solar panels and getting the water.
Yes, once you have all that, you can produce more efficiently than normal production. And in a couple of hundred years[1] you will actually be ahead.
[1] No, I haven't done the maths. Maybe it is 10 years, but the point is still the same. It's never going to produce the profits needed to make an investment of that magnitide[^1]
[^1] Unless you are growing drugs.