Facility agriculture is transforming from the traditional "relying on the weather" to environmental control, year-round production and intelligent management. Whether it is a greenhouse, a plant factory, or a multi-layer three-dimensional culture system, it is inseparable from the continuous and stable energy supply. Modern agricultural facilities are highly related to energy. Plant lighting, temperature and humidity control, ventilation and air change, nutrient solution circulation, automatic equipment operation and other links all need stable power support. Especially in artificial light plant factories and multi-layer cultivation scenarios, the energy consumption brought by LED filling light is very considerable. If the energy cost remains high, the large-scale promotion and commercial operation of facility agriculture will be significantly restricted. Ju Dongying said that the current global facility agriculture is developing in the direction of high energy efficiency, low carbon emissions and intelligence. The Netherlands, Japan, the United States and other countries have accumulated a lot of experience in greenhouse environmental control, plants and factories, and intelligent equipment, but energy cost is still an important factor affecting the profitability of facility agriculture. Taking Japan as an example, although artificial light plant factories have a high level of automation, not all projects can achieve benign operation due to the cost of electricity, land, labor and other costs. This also shows that the key to the success of facility agriculture is not only "planting it," but also "growing it affordably, selling it well and being sustainable." "Photovoltaic power generation is an important direction of green energy use in facility agriculture, but relying on photovoltaic alone cannot completely solve the problem." Photovoltaic power generation is significantly affected by weather and day and night changes, with fluctuations and intermittency, while agricultural facilities have high requirements for power supply stability, Ju said. For example, plant lighting should not be frequently switched on and off, and greenhouse temperature control should not be out of control due to power fluctuations. Therefore, PV must be combined with energy storage systems to convert unstable solar energy into dispatchable, controllable and continuously supplied energy.

"Long-term energy storage technologies such as all-vanadium flow batteries have great potential for agricultural facilities." Compared with some common lithium batteries, flow batteries have characteristics in terms of safety, cycle life and capacity expansion, making them more suitable for scenarios that require a long and stable power supply, Judongying said. Facility agriculture often needs continuous operation at night, and the energy storage duration may reach more than 10 hours, which puts forward higher requirements for the security and stability of energy storage system. "With the advancement of materials, equipment and system integration technology, the cost of long-term energy storage is expected to further decrease, creating conditions for the promotion of integrated agricultural facilities with optical storage." Ju Dongying said. Shandong is a large agricultural province and an area with a good foundation for the development of facility agriculture. At the forum, Leng Changjian, deputy Secretary of the Party Committee and president of Shandong Agricultural University, said in his comments on the report that Shandong is not only a large province of modern agricultural facilities, but also a large province of related technology output. The introduction of Judongying academologist team is to explore and solve the sustainable, low-cost and high-quality development of facility agriculture through the integration of agriculture and light complementarity and facility agriculture. The energy issue, like the food issue, is an important challenge facing the sustainable development of mankind. From the perspective of energy, Academician Ju Dongying's report provides a new solution for facility agriculture to break through the cost bottleneck and expand the development space. At present, Shandong is accelerating the construction of a strong agricultural province and promoting the construction of a higher-level "granary of Qilu". Facility agriculture is an important direction to improve land yield, resource utilization rate and agricultural anti-risk ability, but its development cannot only rely on expanding area and increasing equipment input, but also rely on the deep integration of energy system, intelligent control, engineering technology and agricultural production. This is the significance of the integration of light storage: it is not only to "install photovoltaic panels" in the greenhouse, but also to reconstruct the energy base of facility agriculture, so that agricultural production from a single cropping system to a compound production system integrating energy, equipment, environmental control and data management. Ju Dongying believes that the current light-storage integrated facility agriculture is still facing challenges such as high initial investment, complex system operation and maintenance, and the economic model needs to be improved, which requires technological innovation, industrial coordination and policy support. Only after reducing construction and operation costs, improving intelligent management level and forming a stable profit model, can the integration of optical storage truly move from demonstration to large-scale application.