Question 1

What can a grower actually buy from GRECO?

Accepted Answer

Four things, separately or together: recovered heat delivered as hot water at 50 °C, behind-the-meter electricity, carbon dioxide for enrichment, and serviced land adjacent to the campus. A greenhouse typically wants heat and CO₂; a vertical farm typically wants power. You are not obliged to take the bundle.

Question 2

Why does heat suit a greenhouse but not a vertical farm?

Accepted Answer

They have opposite thermal problems. A greenhouse gets its light free from the sun and spends its money heating the space through a BC winter — which is exactly what recovered heat at 50 °C is good for. A vertical farm lights everything with LEDs for sixteen to eighteen hours a day, so its dominant cost is electricity and its dominant engineering problem is getting heat out of the grow rooms. Selling heat to a vertical farm would be selling them their own problem.

Question 3

Is the heat reliable enough to grow on?

Accepted Answer

The heat comes from computing load that runs continuously, which is a steadier source than most industrial waste heat. That said, no responsible grower designs a facility around a single heat source. Greenhouses on this model keep conventional boilers for peak and backup, and treat recovered heat as the base load that displaces most of the fuel bill rather than all of it.

Question 4

Where does the CO₂ come from, and is it clean enough for a greenhouse?

Accepted Answer

Where a campus runs the Allam-Fetvedt cycle, a pure, pipeline-ready CO₂ stream is an inherent output of the process rather than something bolted on afterwards. Greenhouses already buy CO₂ for enrichment and usually have it trucked in. Specification and delivery are confirmed per site, and food-grade certification is part of that conversation rather than an assumption.

Question 5

Does GRECO build or operate the farm?

Accepted Answer

No. You build it and you run it. GRECO develops the campus and sells power, heat, CO₂ and the land beside it. We are an infrastructure counterparty, not an agriculture operator, and we think growers are better served by a landlord who is clear about that.

Question 6

Has this been done at scale anywhere?

Accepted Answer

Yes. QScale’s 142 MW campus at Lévis, Quebec is designed to redistribute up to 96 MW of recovered heat within a ten-kilometre radius, supporting greenhouses projected to produce roughly 80,000 tonnes of tomatoes and 2,800 tonnes of small fruit a year. The model is proven; what is unusual about a GRECO campus is having power, heat and CO₂ available from a single counterparty on one site.

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