The indoor agriculture industry: A promising player in demand response services

Javier Penuela, Cécile Ben, Stepan Boldyrev, Laurent Gentzbittel and Henni Ouerdane

Applied Energy, 2024, vol. 372, issue C, No S0306261924011395

Abstract: Demand response (DR) programs currently cover about 2% of the average annual global demand, which is far from contributing to the International Energy Agency’s “Net Zero by 2050” roadmap’s 20% target. While aggregation of many small flexible loads such as individual households can help reaching this target, increasing the participation of industries that are major electricity consumers is certainly a way forward. The indoor agriculture sector currently experiences a significant growth to partake in the sustainable production of high-quality food world-wide. As energy-related costs, up to 40% of the total expenses, may preclude full maturity of this industry, DR participation can result in a win-win situation. Indeed, the agriculture system must transform and become a sustainable source of food for an increasing number of people worldwide under the constraints of preservation of soils and water, carbon footprint, and energy efficiency. We considered the case of the Russian Federation where indoor farming is burgeoning and already represents a load of several thousand megawatts. To show the viability of the indoor farming industry participation in implicit and explicit DR programs, we built a physical model of a vertical farm inside a phytotron with complete control of environmental parameters including ambient temperature, relative humidity, CO2 concentration, and photosynthetic photon flux density. This phytotron was used as a model greenhouse. We grew different varieties of leafy plants under simulated DR conditions and control conditions on the same setup. Our results show that the indoor farming dedicated to greens can participate in DR without adversely affecting plant production and that this presents two significant economic advantages: first, on the industry side, savings ranging from 15.34% up to 23.03% of the complementary lighting energy cost; next, an increase of up to 62% of the latest reported capacity participating in the current Russian DR program.

Keywords: Indoor agriculture; Demand response; Vertical farming; Food production; Sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261924011395
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:372:y:2024:i:c:s0306261924011395

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2024.123756

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().