Scale Microgrid Solutions Brings Indoor Farm Microgrid Online

July 16, 2021

By Ethan Howland

Scale Microgrid Solutions brought a 1.75-MW microgrid online for a major indoor farm near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

By ESstock/Shutterstock.com

Scale Microgrid’s modular microgrid for Fifth Season, a startup indoor farming company, uses 160 kW of photovoltaic solar panels, 200 kW of lithium-ion batteries, and a 1,200-kW natural gas generator outfitted with advanced emissions control technology.

The microgrid provides ancillary services to the electric grid and is expected to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 470,000 pounds a year, or the equivalent of taking 39 passenger cars off the road, according to Scale.

Fifth Season’s Braddock indoor farm uses 97% less land and up to 95% less water than traditional farming, according to Scale. Fifth Season uses robotics and artificial intelligence to grow leafy vegetables and herbs year-round.

Fifth Season needs cheap, clean and reliable power to create the ideal indoor farming environment, the Ridgewood, New Jersey-based company said.

“Fifth Season is paving the way for indoor farming, and Scale is improving their energy efficiency and grid resilience, reducing their costs and mitigating their greenhouse gas emissions,” Ryan Goodman, Scale CEO, and co-founder, said July 13.

Scale owns and operates the microgrid at the 60,000-square-foot Braddock farm under an energy-as-a-service contract. Fifth Season didn’t have to pay upfront costs for the microgrid.

The project uses Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Microgrid Advisor (EMA), a cloud-based, demand-side energy management software platform. EMA uses predictive and learning algorithms, which will help Scale efficiently manage the production and use of its renewable energy.

Scale and Schneider previously worked together developing a microgrid for a Bowery Farming indoor farm in New Jersey. The microgrid, commissioned in 2019, includes 815 kW of natural gas-fired generation, 150 kW of solar, and 200 kW of battery storage, according to Scale.

Scale is backed by a $300 million equity commitment from global private equity firm Warburg Pincus.

Vertical Farming in LatAm: AgroUrbana Closes $1m Seed Funding

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July 2, 2020

Richard Martyn-Hemphill

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Access to vertical farming technologies is deepening and widening across the world, bringing down the costs and hassle of locally producing anything from Singaporean strawberries to Arctic tomatoes.

In Latin America, however, indoor vertical farms are still largely written off on a continent thought of in terms of its abundant fertile soil and plentiful sunlight. Why pay for artificial light or indoor automation when the sun is free, and labor and land are cheap?

That said, there are early signs of a Latin American vertical farming awakening in Chile, where AgroUrbana has just closed a $1 million seed round, bringing its total capital raised to $1.5 million. The startup has created South America’s first vertical farm, according to the Association for Vertical Farming.

Leading the round by contributing 33% of the cash was the CLIN Private Investment Fund administered by Chile Global Ventures, the VC arm of Fundación Chile, a public-private initiative for innovation and sustainability in the country. Support financing also came from CORFO, Chile’s economic development agency, and private investors like company builder and VC Engie Factory, the country’s largest telecommunications company Entel, and sustainability investor Zoma Capital.

In an interview with AFN, AgroUrbana founders Cristián Sjögren and Pablo Bunster described how the funds would be put to work at their 3,000 square feet pilot facility in the suburbs of Santiago, where testing is ongoing on layered, renewable energy-powered stacks of hydroponically grown, LED-lit leafy greens and fruits. AgroUrbana’s first big offtake deal has just been inked with a major Chilean grocery retailer, they said.

A pre-planned switch from restaurant to retail

“It’s been run, run, run,” Bunster recalls, describing the political turmoil in Chile that brought curfews and shuttered restaurants months before Covid-19 locked down the country. That earlier disruption, he adds, actually had its upsides, as it got them thinking more about e-commerce and direct-to-consumer sales — so when the team’s restaurant deals dried up during the Covid-19 pandemic, the switch to retail was already scoped out.

As to scaling up further, Sjögren envisions an eventual 30,000 square foot facility to be bankrolled by Series A funding they plan to work towards later this year. The design and output would depend on the results of their pilot trials.

This size of farm sets the team somewhere in the middle of the two dominant visions of vertical farming: centralized versus distributed. Proponents of centralized systems argue that large-scale production — and financial viability — depend on ever-bigger and higher farms. These farms — or plant factories as they are sometimes called — are proliferating, aided by huge sums of capital. Plenty scooped up a whopping $200 million in Series B funding back in 2017. AeroFarms raised $100 million in late-stage funding in 2019 while Fifth Season secured $50 million last year.

Although centralized facilities have generally dominated in terms of raising capital, distributed and decentralized business models are gaining pace according to AgFunder’s 2019 industry report. One in particular, Germany’s Infarm, nabbed $100 million last year to deploy its connected growing cabinets in supermarkets.

The theatricality of these cabinets harmoniously glowing in office buildings or hospitals in a post-coronavirus world also holds sway in the popular and corporate imagination of 2020. Companies like Square Mile Farms recently crowdfunding over $300,000 on the promise of re-kitting office spaces like Microsoft’s London premises with fresh produce. In New York, Farmshelf has its own grow cabinets deployed in WeWork FoodLabs.

Learning from cash-heavy first movers

Mention of relative giants like Plenty or InFarm could be daunting for newer entrants such as Square Mile Farms or AgroUrbana and their hitherto modest sums raised. But there is perhaps an advantage in starting late, so long as the team learns from the costly mistakes and hubris of earlier endeavours. Here, both Bunster and Sjögren see parallels with the renewable energy industry — where they worked previously — and see the arrival of cheaper, more sustainable energy and capital in Chile as crucial to making vertical farming competitive.

AgroUrbana is exploring three options for solar going forward: either establish a power purchase agreement, in which they buy renewable energy from an existing plant; finance a power plant which will sell energy to them later; or build their own solar farm. But they acknowledge that the larger the facility, the less feasible it is to have solar on-site.

The pair describe how some Chilean outdoor farming is already lean and competitive, yet much of it has been geared towards high-value crops like avocados – and that stuff is primed for export. For the urbanizing local market, they see gaps for hyper-local fresh produce, where the competition would actually be with low-tech smallholder farmers with less traceable supply chains. In the context of Covid-19 and an ensuing consumer embrace of e-commerce options, better nutrition, less water use, and fewer pesticides, the pair reckon there is much to gain from providing produce that is consistently fresh, 365 days a year.

Any chance of the world’s first vertically-farmed avocados any time soon? Unlikely, replies Bunster. As for gene editing, where South American jurisdictions are known to have more lax regulations than their North American counterparts, Bunster says the plan was to work with what nature already provides, while giving “the conditions of spring every day of the year.”

Fifth Season Opens Flagship Farm And Partners With NHL Hall of Famer Mario Lemieux

Pittsburgh | Business Wire | June 11, 2020

Partnership comes as Fifth Season announces opening of industry-leading vertical farm, expanded partnerships with Whole Foods and Giant Eagle, and its innovative direct-to-consumer e-commerce platform

Fifth Season, a company that combines vertical farming with proprietary robotics and artificial intelligence to disrupt the country’s produce market and deliver an entirely new category of hyper-local fresh food, announced today it has partnered with NHL Hall of Famer and co-owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins, Mario Lemieux. The company has also launched a new e-commerce website with expanded product offerings and all products shipping from Fifth Season’s newly-opened indoor vertical farm.

The partnership will accelerate Fifth Season’s expansion plans as the company scales the flagship commercial-scale farm in Braddock, PA, a 60,000-sq.-ft. solar-powered farm with twice the efficiency and capacity of traditional vertical farms. The company’s smart design will allow Fifth Season to produce and market over 500,000 pounds of produce in the first year of full operation. Through AI and robotics, Fifth Season's technology tends to each plant’s individual needs at unprecedented levels of efficiency and precision, providing the perfect light, nourishment and environment for healthier produce, higher yield and better flavor.

“Fifth Season’s exciting technology is a game-changer for Pittsburgh,” said Lemieux. “They are positively impacting people's health and happiness by growing large quantities of delicious fresh food, right here in our hard-working industrial communities. Fifth Season is advancing the legacy of our city and I am proud to partner with the team.”

The new, fully-operational farm is accommodating Fifth Season’s increased demand from a growing list of retailers and restaurants, including an expanded retail presence with Whole Foods and Giant Eagle. At the farm, Fifth Season is growing more than 10 unique leafy greens and herb crops with two proprietary salad blends, spinach and arugula hitting shelves first. The company has plans to quickly expand into more leafy green varieties within the year.

“The events over the last several months have revealed that resilient supply chains and consistent access to fresh foods are more critical than ever,” said Fifth Season co-founder and CEO Austin Webb. “The opening of our first commercial-scale farm comes at a perfect time as Fifth Season works to accelerate our plans to reach new and expanding customer bases.”

The company also announced this month the launch of their industry leading direct-to-consumer program, providing both salad greens and salad kits for order and delivery via Fifth Season’s e-commerce website at www.fifthseasonfresh.com. Customers in the Pittsburgh area can place their order directly via the website to have locally-grown and crafted salads delivered right to their homes.

“Consumers want to connect with farms that reflect their values, and they seek convenience in how they receive their fresh food, whether that’s from their favorite grocer, delivered directly to their doorstep, or picked up from the farm,” said Webb. “Everybody prefers locally grown fresh food to flavorless, days-old greens and we’re proud to provide solutions that make choosing local and living healthy easier.”

By delivering its produce within hours of packaging, Fifth Season is setting a new standard for fresh food, at a price competitive with conventional produce. All Fifth Season produce is grown locally and without pesticides and has an average shelf life of weeks, not days. What’s more, Fifth Season’s produce is grown using up to 95 percent less water and 97 percent less land than conventional farming.

These announcements top off a monumental quarter for Fifth Season, which won a World Changing Ideas Award from Fast Company, an honor that highlights projects actively changing what we eat, how we eat and how we get our food. The company also won the Best Build-to-Suit from the NAIOP for its indoor vertical farm design. During the COVID-19 pandemic the company has increased donations of fresh greens and salad kits to essential workers and community organizations throughout Pittsburgh.

About Fifth Season

Fifth Season’s vertical farms combine proprietary robotics and AI with sustainable agriculture to disrupt the country’s $60 billion produce market and deliver an entirely new category of hyper-local, fresh food. Fifth Season’s newest vertical farm in Braddock, Pa., a historic steel town on the edge of Pittsburgh, features a 25,000-sq.-ft. grow room with twice the growing capacity of traditional vertical farms. It is set to grow more than 500,000 lbs. of produce in its first full year of operation. The company’s fresh, tender lettuces, spinach, arugula, “Bridge City” and “Three Rivers” blends, as well as their herbs, receive individualized attention as sensors monitor every condition — humidity, pH, light, nutrient mix — and adjust to each plant’s needs. Fifth Season can even determine the perfect nourishment to give varietals their own buttery or crispy, soft, sharp, or tangy flavor and texture. For more information on Fifth Season, its technology and produce, visit www.fifthseasonfresh.com.

Contacts

Media Contact

Quinn Kelsey
646-677-1810
FifthSeason@icrinc.com

KEYWORD: PENNSYLVANIA UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA

INDUSTRY KEYWORD: ENVIRONMENT SPORTS HOCKEY SUPERMARKET FOOD/BEVERAGE RETAIL AGRICULTURE NATURAL RESOURCES ONLINE RETAIL

SOURCE: Fifth Season

Copyright Business Wire 2020.

PUB: 06/11/2020 08:00 AM/DISC: 06/11/2020 08:02 AM

Bridge City Blend (Photo: Fifth Season)