Conclusions

 

•Integrated PV can offset 10-20% of the energy demand and 10-15% of the carbon footprint of VFs

•High insulation increases energy consumption while reducing the heating capacity needed.

•Heat removal through light cooling can decrease the energy demand by 18% and 24%, respectively.

•Modular vertical farming in the UK still requires further work to be commercially viable. 

Some Crops break even with energy costs however may not be profitable with post-production costs.

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Limitations

 

Since Liberty is a research based company, they haven't run their set-up at full capacity, and so our values for the corresponding crop production were purely theoretical.

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The energy demand was also only calculated for one set conditions in the farm. However, each species of crop has a different set of ideal conditions, meaning heating/cooling and lighting values would have to be adjusted to get a more accurate representation of the variance in demand for each crop.

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Future Work

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Potential future work includes addressing the second limitation by running the model at the ideal conditions for each crop for more accurate results.

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Post-production costs could also be investigated to get a better idea of the economic viability of the farm and provide a comparison to traditional farming.