How energy innovation in indoor vertical farming can improve food security, sustainability, and food safety?

Abstract

Food safety is an important scientific field, but at the same time a discussion topic of modern society that occupies more and more space of our every day time, dealing with the preparation of food, with its nutritious value, and various transportation and storage ways aiming at preventing food-related sickness. This work compares traditional farming with greenhouses and indoor vertical farming focusing on the challenges and the opportunities for each category. The scope of this work was to stress the role of indoor vertical farming towards this direction. Indoor vertical farms can produce high quality and virus-free products that can be locally distributed, inside the urban environment that such investments take place, saving annually millions of tons CO2 emissions. Beyond that, in this work it was pointed out how energy plays a role in food safety in such systems. It was stressed that indoor vertical farms can act as a demand response aggregator. In large scale units it could play a role to adjust their production according to different electricity prices offered in different time zones throughout the day. This way, the owners under a multi-value business model will create the opportunity to the vertical farm owners not only to improve their production but at the same time absorb inexpensive electricity offered, by creating an additional profit mechanism (multiple revenue streams) under such an approach by entering into contracts with companies in a utility electric region.