This has "fiasco" written all over it: Guy with no farming background plans large indoor farms in Minneapolis, powered in winter by solar/wind/etc

The New Agtivist: Gene Fredericks is thinking inside the city’s big box | Feeding the City | Grist

A. It's a new business that will transform unused warehouse space into year-round indoor growing centers. We'll use hydroponics and aquaponics, along with advanced low-energy lighting techniques and vertical growing methods, to produce the very freshest leafy greens for local consumption regardless of climate.
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Q. You're kind of a techno geek with no farming background. What makes you qualified to start BGB?

A. Well, I look at Big Green Boxes as a high-tech business.
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A. We'll take a freestanding vacant retail space or warehouse space, around 30,000 square feet, climate-control it, and set up some ponds and tanks for the fish -- pleasant ones you can see, not unlike the goldfish and Koi ponds in an office-building lobby or a park. There'll also be small waterfalls, which in addition to looking nice help aerate the water. The water from the ponds and tanks will go into settling tanks as well as a few bio-filtering tanks that will make sure no elements that might harm the plants or the fish get through. The nutrient-rich water then flows into the growing areas. The plants and growing area then filter the water, which gets recycled back to the fish.
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Big Green Boxes' controlled growing environment will have a greater impact in places like Minneapolis and Chicago in the winter, and Las Vegas and Phoenix in the summer.
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Our goal is to be as carbon-neutral as possible. We'll be using daylighting techniques to capture the sunlight, and we'll use a lot of LED lighting, which is a bit pricy but is very inexpensive to operate, and pays for itself in energy savings within a year or so. We'll augment these with other higher-intensity lights to add to the overall color spectrum and provide some desirable heat. To power the growing we'll use a range of alternate power sources like solar, wind, and other energy-saving techniques.