Pathways for Greenhouse Thermal Management’s Contribution to Net-Zero Food Production

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Highlights the importance of psychrometric modeling and system integration in agricultural energy systems.

🏢実務担当者:Offers guidance on heat recovery, dehumidification, and renewable integration for greenhouse operators.

🏛政策担当者:Informs policies supporting agricultural decarbonization, especially regarding infrastructure for heat and CO2 supply.

Decarbonising greenhouse food production requires improvements in thermal management, energy efficiency, and system integration. Greenhouse energy demand is shaped by coupled heat and mass transfer processes, particularly envelope performance, ventilation, and latent heat associated with humidity control. This article synthesises recent advances in greenhouse microclimate control with emphasis on heat transfer, low-carbon heating and cooling, thermal storage, renewable and waste heat integration, and advanced modelling and control approaches. The review shows that humidity control and latent load management are primary drivers of winter energy use, as moisture removal through ventilation and dehumidification directly increases the sensible heating required to maintain indoor temperature setpoints. When assessed using realistic psychrometric relationships, ventilation and dehumidification can dominate peak heating demand and seasonal consumption. The performance of heat pumps, storage systems, semi-closed greenhouse concepts, and renewable heat pathways depends on how thermal loads are defined, how system boundaries are set, and how technologies are integrated in operation. Digital twins, predictive control, and hybrid physics-data models are increasingly used to manage variability in weather, energy prices, and infrastructure constraints. Greenhouse decarbonisation cannot be treated as a simple substitution of energy sources. System performance depends on coordinated design and operation, including heat recovery, moisture removal, and integration of supply technologies. Semi-closed and heat recovery-based configurations can reduce the ventilation–heating penalty and lower primary energy demand compared with vent-to-dry approaches. Long-term market projections suggest that the commercial greenhouse sector could expand substantially by 2050 under plausible growth scenarios, reflecting increased capital investment rather than a proportional rise in global food output. Net-zero greenhouse production is achievable through combined improvements in thermal management, electrification, and renewable energy integration. However, large-scale deployment depends on consistent modelling assumptions, credible economic assessment, and alignment with heat and CO2 supply infrastructure. The transition is therefore shaped by system integration and planning as much as by individual technologies.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.3390/en19081975first seen 2026-05-15 17:46:32