‘Smart lighting’ might make vertical farming more affordable

Playing with the dimmer switch may help some indoor farmers curb one of their biggest challenges: soaring electricity costs.

Growing crops in stacked rows indoors less than fixed-intensity artificial lights can produce more food per square foot while the use of less land and water than traditional outside farms. But this vertical farming technique is likewise energy intensive and expensive (SN: 9/26/08). Now, researchers have designed a working laptop or computer program that controls lights to optimize both photosynthesis and electric bills. Described September 24 in Frontiers in Science, the non-public computer program adjusts the intensity of grow lights hourly in keeping with the changing cost of electricity.

This “smart lights” may perhaps potentially cut vertical farms’ electricity costs by as much as 12 percent, says Leo Marcelis, a horticulturist at Wageningen University inside the Netherlands. That may save some farms tens of thousands of greenbacks once a year, per the 2021 Global CEA Census Report — a survey of the indoor and controlled environment agriculture industry — and Marcellis’ own projections.

But how may indoor crops fare less than dynamic lights? Marcelis and colleagues tested how leafy greens equivalent to basil, spinach and arugula reacted to light patterns that changed hourly. One group of flowers grew less than high- then low-intensity lights intervals. Yet another group grew less than light that was more intense inside the morning and dimmer inside the afternoon. Both groups’ mature weight and leaf area — which is ready to envision a plant’s value inside the supermarket — were about comparable to flowers grown less than fixed intensity lights.

The new computer program didn’t determine the experimental lights conditions, on the opposite hand the team now knows that indoor farms have room to steer clear of wasting on electricity. Continued research that tests dynamic lights on larger scales is required, Marcelis says. He plans to continue experimenting with how a lot dynamic lights indoor crops can do something about.

The study “appears to be a really good proposal to start up more research,” says Fatemeh Sheibani, a plant physiologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. But she emphasizes that the work is preliminary, and that dynamic lights is “not a near-term benefit for vertical farming.”