Indoor agriculture is moving from niche market to the agricultural mainstream, with the global market being valued at $26.8 billion in 2018. As the effects from climate change make it harder to grow profitable crops outdoors while meeting the food demand of a growing population, indoor agriculture offers many benefits in terms of food and economic security.
Yet indoor farming is an energy-hungry practice; high operating costs have restricted indoor farming thus far to high-value markets, and concerns over carbon intensity threaten to hamper the fledgling industry’s growth. Clean energy technologies can unleash indoor farming’s growth by lowering both costs and carbon emissions. Indoor cannabis cultivation is well-positioned to be the first market to widely demonstrate and deploy these technologies.