More Detail on Gordon Graff's Skyfarm
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 07.28.08
We first showed Gordon Graff's vertical farm proposal for Toronto a year ago, noting that it could provide "tomatoes to throw at the latest dud at the Princess of Wales Theatre to the east, and olives for the Club District to the north." We never did get much information about it or the the designer. Now Murray Whyte of the Star interviews Graff, a student in the Master of Architecture program at the University of Waterloo.
"We're not inventing anything new here," says Graff, garrulous and passionate, with a thorough commitment to the burgeoning field of green architecture. "It might seem space-age, but all of the technology required to do this exists right now, today."
Gordon Graff; Picture by Sean Kilpatrick, the Star
Graff explains the rationale for vertical farms:"Unless we want to start talking about human population control – which is politically impossible, in a democracy – we have to start considering new strategies," Graff says. "There's either going to be massive famine, or we'll have to condense our agricultural practice."
While the site he originally proposed is now planted with condos, Graff's vision now is smaller, more local vertical farms. "The real sweet spot for this is six-to-10 storey neighbourhood farms......Human beings have never shown the capacity to consume less," he says. "The simple fact is that, somehow, we have to find a way to produce more." ::The Star
HOW SKYFARM COULD WORK
"Gordon Graff's Skyfarm isn't intended as an out-there suggestion of what might be. He's convinced it would work, right now. In Graff's conception, Skyfarm is a self-sustaining system.
It almost has to be: With virtually no penetration of natural light, Skyfarm's demand for electric lighting comes in at an estimated 82 million kilowatt hours per year. The average household uses about 10,000 kwh annually.
Hooking Skyfarm into the grid would completely cancel out any of the energy-saving advantages gained by not having to truck its produce thousands of kilometres. And then there's all that water – 59 storeys of hydroponic plants, stacked half a dozen storeys deep.
But Graff thought of that. Skyfarm would be equipped with its own biogas plant, to produce methane from its own waste. When burned, methane produces less carbon dioxide than other hydrocarbon fuels. It would be used by Skyfarm to produce its own electricity.
When Skyfarm is unable to produce enough waste to power itself – Graff estimates that the farm's internal waste would generate enough methane to fulfill 50 per cent of its energy needs – he suggests a win-win partnership with the city. Waste that travels to civic composting facilities – with questionable renewability, by some accounts – could be diverted to Skyfarm's anaerobic digester to produce the methane it needs. Skyfarm could take on some other problems to its benefit, too: Sewage is a rich methane source.
And the water issue? Enter the Living Machine, a patented biological water-filtration system that would recover waste water from sewage and divert it to Skyfarm's hydroponic growing demands."- Murray Whyte, the Star
Our Round-up of Vertical Farm Proposals:
Vertical (Diagonal?) Farm from Work AC in NYC
More Vertical Farms in TreeHugger
Mithun Architects' Vertical Farm for Seattle
Sky Farm Proposed for Downtown Toronto
Vertical Farms Get the New York Times Treatment
Futurama Farming in New York
The Future of Farming: Vertical or Horizontal?
Adam Stein on Vertical Farms : "Pie in the Sky"
Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
- Will there be farms in New York City's skyscrapers?
- 7 Great Reasons to Use a Crock Pot
- Top 10 TreeHugger Stories of 2008
- Top 8 Supper Club Recipes of 2008: Green Meals to Really Impress Guests
When will one of these be built? Organic Local farming, at a fraction of the price of goods transported from Mexico. Sounds great to me.
What a great way to increase he amount of arable land in the world. With a good enough electric grid, we could even power our farms with sunlight from anywhere in the world- AND have a longer growing season, if we heat the interior with the waste heat from the biogas.
A study in Alberta has shown that the larger the biogas installation, the more profitable it becomes. This accounts only for biogas generation from cow manure, but I guess it can account for any other source very accurately.
That's why I don't imagine every house with its own biogas plant. It would be a huge waste.
However, for a 6-to-10 stories high building growing food and using waste to produce its biogas, it would undoubtedly generate a fair amount of energy.
i agree, every house with its own biogas facility would be incredibly inefficient. along with other sustainable strategies like wind, solar, natural heat sources, gray water, etc., biogas is probably best dealt with on scale larger than the individual house and smaller than a whole city. i could see clusters of buildings like this forming cooperatives that take care of all these issues quite efficiently.
i could see communities (cooperatives?) like this, associated with others in large regional cooperatives, being able to almost completely sustain themselves in the next 20 years in most climates.
actually, they'll probably have to... i don't really see any other solution that doesn't result in "human population control" as graff says.
Food waste produces around 8-10 times more biogas than human or animal manure.
>Graff says. "There's either going to be massive famine, or >we'll have to condense our agricultural practice."
There IS actually another potential option. While these days many are talking about cellulosic ethanol, a real break-through would be simply cellulosic GLUCOSE or starch. If we managed to turn biomass (read: cellulose) into starch, this could then become a source of food. The amount of land required to feed humanity would be dramatically reduced. Cities could easily feed themselves. People could move out of sensitive habitats (fertile land) by the millions and move into the cities. This could be the most significant outcome of this whole second-generation biofuels push, which from an energetic point of view, is a bad idea. AGAIN. To be able to turn leaves/grass/macroalgae into sugars that we (or animals) can digest would make traditional agriculture disappear in a hurry. And with it all the artificlal fertilizer and pesticides that keep it going.
Urban vertical farms will really only take off once this breakthrough is achieved. Cheap glucose and starch make great starting points for all sorts of materials, like bioplastics.
A solution to expensive electrons in lieu of sunlight:
Build the skyscraper with those solartubes that pull sunlight via mirrors from the sides of buildings into the center of each floor - this would be an ideal chance to really utilize this technology on a massive scale, not for merely one bathroom skylight in one house, but have it penetrate every floor by lining the sides of the skyscraper with tubed in sunshine that could be shining in long lines of sunlight deep inside each floor.
At Inhabitat: look at the classroom, and imagine it as an open loft space - an entire floor full of plants
http://www.inhabitat.com/2006/12/28/solar-tube/
(I can't find the site I had seen this idea with the solar tube mounted on the sides of buildings, but you can imagine that: it only has to be a small opening skyward.)
Sorry, but the concept is fundamentally flawed. Every bit of energy in the biomass that is converted to biogas comes from photosynthesis. The light comes from the electricity that comes from the biogas. Wildly optimistic numbers for the efficiency of those steps would be:
10% photosynthesis efficiency
80% biomass to biogas
50% biogas to electricity
50% electricity to light
Multiply those and you get 2%. Net result: only 2% of the electricity used can come from waste generated on site, very best case, and 98% has to be imported. An option would be to truck in farm waste from outside the city--50X the waste generated on site--and use that to generate electricity on site, but that's a lot more trucking than if you just trucked in tomatoes.
As a matter of fact:
Photosynthesis has an efficiency of 95% and top notch biogas thermal power plants have a thermal efficiency of about 45% (55% for natural gas) on cogeneration plants.
By adding these points together, we get approximately 10%, which is the number engineers from Germany accounted as the maximum potential of anaerobic digestion to meet energy needs.
However, add up the waste from other sources. Anaerobic digestion relies on any organic matter, ranging from pig manure, slaughterhouse wastes or wastewater sludge. But this energy would have to be imported, yes. I believe every energy source needs importation anyways.
The phrase "living machine" and use of chickens still disturbs me, especially his willingness to house chickens "with virtually no penetration of natural light." This may be efficient, and it may even be chemical-free, but I wouldn't call it organic.
I totally agree with Charlie.
I'm getting tired of constantly explaining to people the basic laws of nature.
Gordon also says :"Unless we want to start talking about human population control – which is politically impossible, in a democracy " -Why is this impossible in a democracy?
"That's why I don't imagine every house with its own biogas plant. It would be a huge waste."
Not necessarily so. I had a ferrocement biogas-harvesting septic tank built for my house at what would today here in the Philippines cost $120, cheaper than a conventional concrete septic tank. It saves me about $60 a year in cokking gas expenses.
It is fed at present solely from ny pour-flush toilet bowl, although has enough capacity to receive solid wastes (e.g., rubbish, leaves) to produce for all my cooking, lighting and refrigeration, if I ever get around to it.
Or to receive the toilet bowl waste of two other houses.
A centralized biogas setup would on the other hand have to take into account the additional cost of sewer piping (for communities with no sanitary sewers yet), which I understand can be nineteen times more than the cost of the biogas works itself.