Research · Framework proposal · Information design
Research into the energy an indoor farm never sees
3 min read
Role
Research and Framework Design
Timeline
2023
Scope
Research · Framework proposal · Information design
Industries
Indoor vertical farming · Energy
Outcome
Identified a 60% monitoring blind spot
What the platform could not see
This is desk research into how indoor vertical farms use electricity, and a framework I proposed for measuring and reducing it. Electricity is the largest running cost in vertical farming, reaching up to 70 percent of an operating budget in the published figures I reviewed. AGEYE’s platform metered the grow racks and nothing else, which left most of the building unmeasured. Nothing here was built: the output is the research, the framework, and the case for funding the first stage of it.
Chart splitting farm energy: 38% lighting, 56% HVAC, 40% monitored
The brief
I reviewed the published literature on energy use across vertical farming operations and mapped it against what AGEYE actually measured.
Lighting draws 38 percent of a facility’s electricity and HVAC draws 56 percent.
AGEYE’s platform metered 40 percent of facility energy, almost all of it grow racks.
Industry sources put avoidable energy cost at up to $250,000 a year per facility.
The gap is the finding. Sixty percent of the load, including all of the HVAC and the whole of the peak demand behaviour, sat outside the product, so any efficiency the platform reported was efficiency on the smaller half of the bill.
The solution
I proposed a framework with three tiers, meant to be adopted in that order.
Metering: instrument HVAC, pumps and auxiliary equipment to reach 95 percent of facility energy, and report two standard measures, kilowatt hours per kilogram of produce and kilowatt hours per square foot of grow area.
Prediction: forecast consumption peaks, flag equipment drifting outside its normal draw, and schedule against day ahead market prices to avoid demand charges.
Renewables: solar, battery storage and microgrid options, with the vendor partnerships and government incentive programmes that pay for them.
Every number attached to this framework is a projection, the coverage target and the savings range included, because none of it has been deployed. What the tiers are worth is the order they are in: the first one is what makes the other two measurable at all.
Four cards showing coverage, demand cuts, forecasting and estimated annual savings
The process
Optimisation without measurement is guesswork, so the first tier is metering and nothing else. HVAC, the largest single consumer in the building, was completely untracked, which meant the biggest available saving could not even be sized, let alone claimed.
The tiers are sequenced to be affordable rather than complete. A facility installs meters, runs on them, adds prediction, then looks at renewables, so no farm has to interrupt production to adopt the whole thing at once. The two standard measures were chosen so a farm can compare itself to its own last quarter, and to other facilities, without agreeing on anything else first.
The impact
What the research produced
The work produced three things: a measured blind spot, a framework, and a costed argument for closing it.
Sixty percent of facility energy sat outside the platform’s view.
A three tier strategy addresses the industry’s largest operating expense, in the order the tiers depend on each other.
Projected savings and coverage figures give a finance team something to approve or reject.
None of this shipped. The decision the framework asks for is whether to fund the metering tier first and measure the rest of the building, before anyone claims a number about efficiency.