Fully indoor farms spend a lot of their time and energy replicating the sun, but Kentucky-based AppHarvest tries to have it both ways.

The startup, founded in 2018, relies on sunlight during the day and high-powered lighting at night, unlike the fully indoor farms that only use artificial lighting. (Don’t worry, AppHarvest still has over 36,000 LEDs in its Morehead, Kentucky, plant.)

• It aims to enhance the traditional greenhouse concept with climate-control technology and a closed-loop water-recycling regimen that includes harvesting rainwater—a process which it says uses up to 90% less water compared to traditional farms.

Soakin’ up the sun: AppHarvest claimed in its 2020 sustainability report that relying on the sun to help grow its plants in daylight hours has led to an almost 20% reduction in its electricity consumption compared with standard HPS lights, while ensuring that lights are only used 40% of the available time. LED lighting is typically the main energy expense for vertical farms, and energy is itself typically the main cost.

• “We’ve taken this approach because we think we can get a lower cost in the long term by being able to use free sunlight and free rainwater. But there’s going to be applications, they’re different everywhere in the world,” Jonathan Webb, co-founder of AppHarvest, told Emerging Tech Brew.

AppHarvest operates the nation’s biggest hydroponic greenhouse, which opened last year, and plans to open 11 more facilities by 2025.

By the numbers: The company went public via SPAC in January 2021 at a valuation of over $1 billion, and in Q1 2022, it recorded $5.2 million in net sales, more than double the $2.3 million it generated in Q1 2021.

• But it wrote in its Q1 2022 earnings release that it expects to incur losses “for the foreseeable future,” as it continues to build more facilities into 2025.

Zoom out: One challenge for the company is that while AppHarvest relies in large part on the most renewable energy source of all—the sun itself—nearly all of its electricity comes from fossil fuel-based sources, per its 2021 sustainability report published in June.

Other large, fully indoor vertical farming operations, like Bowery Farming and Upward Farms, claim their farms run on 100% renewable energy.

Keep reading the full story here.—JM

There’s fresh fusion funding afoot.

Zap Energy, a Seattle-based nuclear-fusion startup, announced a $160 million Series C last week, bringing its total funding to just over $200 million since its founding in 2017.

Why it matters: Alongside the news of new capital, the company’s founders told the NYT that they are within a year of proving that their unconventional, lower-cost approach to nuclear fusion can do what no fusion system has ever done: produce more electricity than it uses. Many energy experts are skeptical that we’ll see at-scale nuclear fusion any time soon, but if scientists manage to crack the code, we’d effectively have limitless clean energy.

• Zap is pursuing an approach called a “Z-pinch,” which differs from the Tokamak-based technique favored by its quickly expanding group of competitors.
• There are at least 35 different nuclear-fusion companies now, and investment in the space surged last year.

The startup’s approach to fusion has been cast aside by most other researchers because of its instability, but if it pans out, the company claims its tech will be “orders of magnitude less expensive than competing systems,” per the NYT.

Zap’s claim that it will demonstrate net electricity within one year is more aggressive than some of its better-capitalized, Tokamak-touting peers. Helion Energy, which raised a $500 million Series C last fall, aims to demonstrate net electricity by 2024. CFS, which raised a record-smashing $1.8 billion last December, is eyeing 2025.

Big picture: Although scientific and financial milestones have been crossed in the last year, there’s no guarantee that nuclear fusion will work at a large-scale any time soon. Many energy experts argue it will take decades for fusion to power society—if ever.

Read this story on-site.—DM

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

I help build, launch, and operate small satellites that give us benefits here on Earth similar to the really big satellites, but at a fraction of the price.

What’s your favorite emerging tech project you’ve worked on?

I really enjoy the creative process involved in building cost-effective, highly capable satellites. When you are planning to launch a constellation of small satellites, you have strict requirements and cost constraints, but that then allows the design and build engineers to get creative.

Sometimes that means modifying off-the-shelf components (for example, radiation hardening), other times it means creating components or subsystems that have never been built before. It’s all about managing risk, and it’s super fun working with an ambitious team in a startup just trying to make things happen faster and cheaper than traditional aerospace companies thought was possible.

What’s the best piece of tech-related media you’ve read/watched/listened to?

I enjoy listening to YouTube discussions of emerging tech companies as investment opportunities. It forces me to learn and understand technologies outside my own realm of expertise, and it reminds me to focus on the business viability side of things. This morning I was listening to Good Soil Investment Management, and I got to hear more about the metaverse, robotics, and EV adoption. Emmet and Matt are great.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?

I used to compete as a professional natural bodybuilder during and just after college.

Stat: The two biggest share sales so far this year were both EV battery makers, per the WSJ. CATL raised $6.7 billion last week, and LG Energy raised $10.6 billion in January.

Quote: “If Dish’s lobbying efforts succeed, our study shows that Starlink customers will experience harmful interference more than 77% of the time and total outage of service 74% of the time, rendering Starlink unusable for most Americans.”—SpaceX, in a statement about a contentious slice of spectrum

Read: Here’s how Google’s DALL-E 2 competitor—Imagen—actually works.

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We didn’t publish a newsletter last Monday, which means there was no news quiz. We know, we know—you missed it dearly. Fear not, we’re back in business.

Click here to take this week’s news quiz.

For a battery brain blast: Breaking down the role of ultrasound in battery manufacturing.

For sharper searching: Brave released a feature that enables users to customize their search results.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• As inflation drives up EV prices, automakers plead for tax credit extension
• As quantum computing advances, who’s thinking about ethics?
• How AI-based “nowcasts” try to parse economic uncertainty