How Cannabis Can Offer Lessons in Green Indoor Production
Indoor agriculture is moving from niche market to the agricultural mainstream, with a global market valued at $26.8 billion in 2018. As the effects from climate change make it harder to grow profitable crops outdoors while meeting the food demand of a growing population, indoor agriculture offers many benefits in terms of food and economic security.
Yet indoor farming requires heavy energy use; high operating costs have restricted indoor farming thus far to high-value markets, and concerns over carbon intensity threaten to hamper the fledgling industry’s growth. Clean energy technologies can unleash indoor farming’s growth by lowering both costs and carbon emissions. Indoor cannabis cultivation is well-positioned to be the first market to widely demonstrate and deploy these technologies.
Taking a holistic approach to facility design, energy procurement and storage, and source of supplemental carbon dioxide for plant growth can all provide huge environmental and economic benefits. These strategies also mitigate risk for the energy utility servicing the indoor farming facility and should be incentivized by the utility to help facilities recoup investment costs.
Cannabis can catalyze the trend to grow other plants indoors and help bring the costs down to make it economically feasible.
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