High-yield Solar Greenhouse harvests food & energy (timelapse)

In the mountains overlooking Barcelona, a team at Valldaura labs has built a solar greenhouse that harnesses the sun both to grow plants and to create energy to power the hydroponic system for year-round growing. The unit is providing food for the lab’s kitchen, as well as for a local restaurant, but it’s also a prototype for urban food self-sufficiency and a larger model is currently being built on the roof of a new Barcelona skyscraper.

The wood for the prototype was all harvested, milled, dried, processed and pressed into CLT (cross laminated timber) boards entirely on-site. All the pieces were designed to snap together, every joint pre-planned on computer and all hinges were custom CNC-printed.

The planting method is all hydroponics, using sawdust waste from the lab as the substrate. The greenhouse is irrigated with rainwater which is recaptured, after going through the hydroponic system, to be reused on the gardens.

The students and teachers at Valldaura hope that their two-story greenhouse can serve as a prototype for urban rooftop food production. Currently, a 100 square meter version is being built atop a new wooden skyscraper that will be Catalonia’s tallest CLT building.

Valldaura Self Sufficient Labs https://iaac.net/project/valldaura-self-sufficient-labs
Philipp Wienkämper (student) https://www.youtube.com/@nullplus3576/videos

On *faircompanies https://faircompanies.com/videos/high-yield-solar-greenhouse-harvests-food-energy-timelapse/

16 Replies to “High-yield Solar Greenhouse harvests food & energy (timelapse)”

  1. Awesome! 😍 this video could easily have been an hour and it would fly by! More please! 🙏

  2. Absolute nonsense… Typical nonsense by some students who combine buzzwords…

    Using solar pannels on the greenhouse roof to produce artificial light to light the same greenhouse you are shading with the solar cells… This is some propper 21st century nonsense…

    Overnengineering growing system is just as ridiculous as the current green enregy bullshit… It looks nice but nobody can afford the end product…

  3. Pity we can’t survive just on salad. Can they grow other things. Does this mean leaving the actual land for animal farming?

  4. Wonderful project, but not an environmentally friendly way of producing food. When I look at all the costs of the plant to produce a few leaves of lettuce. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with a possible cost-effective way of producing food to feed us. Thanks for the video.

  5. This looks like an incredible amount of effort to some thing that costs next to nothing to do on flatter ground.

  6. All i could concentrate on is the hairy slug under his nose, please direct him to the chemist to buy razor and shave it off…. then i might take him seriously

  7. As someone who has an aquaponics farm, I approve. However I see many inefficiencies in his design; good start though.

  8. Sounds and looks interesting but at the end, I am always disappointed. It is a lot of effort to grow almost exclusively salads. Sadly, the more I think about it, the less I am convinced… We are not there yet.

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