Best Possible Use of a Vacant Lot?

What’s the best possible use of a vacant lot? Besides a tiny house, of course. A vertical farm!

Now, this is not an obvious answer, especially not in Jackson, Wyoming, where tourists swoop in and out like birds and a vacant lot can go for $1 million. But it is a potentially exciting one.

the town is about to become home to one of the only vertical farms in the world. On a thin slice of vacant land next to a parking lot, a startup called Vertical Harvest recently broke ground on a new three-story stack of greenhouses that will be filled with crops like microgreens and tomatoes.

“We’re replacing food that was being grown in Mexico or California and shipped in,” explains Penny McBride, one of the co-founders. “We feel like the community’s really ready for a project like this. Everybody’s so much more aware of the need to reduce transportation, and people like to know their farmer and where food’s coming from.”

The small plot of land is owned by the town, and the building that houses the farm will be owned by the town as well, as part of a partnership. The founders spent five years working with the city to fully vet the idea — from how well the business model can support itself to how the efficient the new building will be.

Even better:

The startup plans to employ workers with developmental disabilities who have few local options for a job. “We have a certain number of hours of work and divide it up based on ability, desire, and skill,” Yehia explains. “The job is developed based on how many hours someone wants to work and can work.”

It’s hydroponic! It’s energy-efficient! It’s a public-private partnership to grow healthy, accessible food that seems to benefit everyone involved! Somewhere Michael Pollan is so overjoyed he’s doing the chicken dance.

In other green news, the solar panel industry may now employ more domestic workers than coal. (As with many things, it depends how you measure.) And in Portland, a start up has developed pipes that harness the power of hot water.

For water utilities, which use massive amounts of electricity, the system can make it cheaper to provide clean drinking water. Utilities can either use the power themselves or sell it to a city as a new source of revenue.

“We have a project in Riverside, California, where they’re using it to power streetlights at night,” Semler says. “During the day, when electricity prices are high, they can use it to offset some of their operating costs.”

In Portland, one of the city’s main pipelines now uses Lucid’s pipes to make power that’s sent into the grid. Though the system can’t generate enough energy for an entire city, the pipes can power individual buildings like a school or library, or help offset a city’s total energy bill. Unlike wind or solar power, the system can generate electricity at any time of day, regardless of weather, since the pipes always have water flowing through them.

You go, water! I always knew you had it in you.

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