Comment by Daishiman
18 hours ago
Serving cat videos is about at least three orders of magnitude less energy than required to grow food. How much energy do you think you need to light half a hectare with 1 kWh LED lamps?
18 hours ago
Serving cat videos is about at least three orders of magnitude less energy than required to grow food. How much energy do you think you need to light half a hectare with 1 kWh LED lamps?
Depending on a bunch of factors
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601....]
[https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/how-much-energy-does-it-take-t...]
But let’s say we take the upper end of energy consumption multiples between input energy and output energy (kcal), say 120 times. So to feed 1 person 2000 kcal per day, would require 240,000 kcal worth of ‘production’ energy, which at that multiple would add up to 278 kWh per day per person. Signifiant!
Multiply that by the population of the US (345 million), and that is a lot of kWh for sure - 95910000000 kWh. But it looks like national energy usage is measured in ‘quads’. And that is .3 quads per day.
Current US energy production is approximately 100 quads per year, and consumption a bit less than that at around 90 something.
[https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/]
So if we picked the absolute least efficient most energy consuming plants, and grew them in the least efficient type of growing environment, we’d need to drop everything and devote all our energy production to it.
Assuming no rationing, no efficiency improvements (LED lights are quite efficient now, and if we really had this issue we’d of course devote 100% of available production to them!), and no bulk commercial production of simpler foodstuffs (we can make bulk sugars and proteins via bioreactors right now, for instance), it would be terrible but possible. At least for the US.
Countries with more solar production, or colder, would be harder hit of course.
China would be well positioned probably to pivot, and I’d be surprised if they didn’t use it to their advantage. Especially with turning up their nukes and pivoting all their solar plants to making LEDs instead.
India and Bangladesh would be really screwed though.
Everyone would finally think farming was cool again though, so that’s a plus.
I take it you never bought LED panels for indoor grow ops right? Never considered the cost and resources required for the wiring, installation, programming, making greenhouses in the span of a year? Do you know how much copper you need per capita? The bottlenecks in manufacturing? This is pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking.
I have to say that this thread is very frustrating to read. I see @lazide is engaging with you in good faith and providing high effort, thoughtful answers. There's a lot of statistics and factors involved in a discussion like this. So I won't say @lazide's analysis is correct or flawed. But this is a good topic where a good discussion can be had and @lazide is holding up their end of the bargain.
But every response of yours is dismissive. And this makes this thread frustrating to read. You answer every reply with more questions and a tone of dismissal. If you know so much about this area, why don't you begin sharing some facts and enlighten us? Dismissing your co-commenter and answering their replies with more questions is not educating anyone of anything!
It would help if instead of answering a comment with questions, you share what you know. So how much is the cost of wiring, installation, programming and making greenhouses in the span of a year? How much copper is needed per capita? What do you know? Tell us!
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