Growing Food With Data, Energy and Intelligence
Energy is the line item that decides whether controlled-environment agriculture works. A GRECO campus produces three things a grower pays for — electricity, heat and carbon dioxide — and has land beside it. Growers can buy any of them, on a meter, from one counterparty.
Two Kinds of Grower, Two Different Products
Greenhouses and vertical farms are often spoken about together, but they have opposite energy problems. Selling both the same thing would waste everyone’s time, so we don’t.
Greenhouses buy heat and CO₂
Light is free and comes from the sky. The cost that matters is heating the space through winter, and recovered heat at 50 °C lands squarely in the range a glasshouse heating loop wants. Enrichment CO₂, normally trucked in, can come across the fence instead.
Vertical farms buy power
LEDs run sixteen to eighteen hours a day, so electricity is the dominant cost and the dominant engineering problem is moving heat out of the grow rooms. Our heat is of little use to you — what matters is firm power at a predictable price, on our side of the meter.
Schematic of the supply relationships, not a simulation. Switch the view to see which products a given grower actually buys.
Why It Is Worth Being Next Door
Every one of these is available elsewhere. What is unusual is having all of them at one address, from one owner.
Power that is already energized
GRECO campuses generate behind the meter, so a grower connects to capacity that exists rather than joining an interconnection queue. For a vertical farm, where electricity is the single largest line item, that is the whole conversation.
Heat at a useful temperature
Liquid cooling returns compute heat at 45–48 °C and plate heat exchangers lift it to 50 °C. That is hot enough to run a greenhouse heating loop directly, and it arrives through a metered Energy Transfer Station rather than an informal arrangement.
CO₂ from next door, not a truck
Enrichment CO₂ is normally delivered by road. Where the campus runs the Allam-Fetvedt cycle, a pure CO₂ stream is an inherent product of generation, so it can be piped across the fence instead.
One counterparty, one lease
Power, heat, CO₂ and land negotiated once, with one owner, on one site. Assembling the same package from a utility, a gas supplier, an industrial gas company and a landlord is where these projects usually stall.
This Model Already Runs at Scale
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 idea of heating a greenhouse with computing heat is not speculative. What is unusual about a GRECO campus is that the power, the heat and the CO₂ all come from the same counterparty on the same site — so the grower negotiates once.
You grow. We supply.
GRECO does not build or operate farms, and has no ambition to. We develop the campus, generate the power, recover the heat and service the land — you bring the growing expertise, which is the part we would be worst at. Agreements are structured as metered supply and a land lease, so your operation stays yours and our infrastructure stays ours.
Heat That the Neighbourhood Can See
A large electrical load asks something of the community that hosts it. Food grown year-round on the same site, heated by energy that would otherwise be vented, is a tangible answer — local produce, permanent skilled jobs and a visible use for waste heat rather than a cooling tower.
See the rest of what a campus offtakesGrowing beside a GRECO campus: common questions
Tell us what you are growing
Crop, footprint and the heat or power load you are planning around. We will tell you honestly whether a campus site fits — and if it does not, we will say so.