One thing the article doesn't mention is that some plants prefer a little shade.
So while broccoli yeilds may have "held steady," it's possible they could make even more gains elsewhere. So leafy vegetables like spinach might be doing equivalently fine under the magenta shades in New Jersey, but might actually be even better in Texas.
CdTe panels are limited by availability of tellurium. Maybe we'll mine that in space one day; much of the Earth's Te was lost as volatile H2Te. The abundance of Te in carbonaceous chondrites is about 1000x that in the Earth's crust.
Economics would suggest full spectrum panels on the outside + LED-lights on the right spectrum on the inside will always be more affordable than specialized panels. You still need lights with magenta panels to hit 18+hrs of light a day. Once the lights are already installed, specialized panels would be hard to justify a mark-up.
> Economics would suggest full spectrum panels on the outside + LED-lights on the right spectrum on the inside will always be more affordable than specialized panels.
Lookup the energy needs to grow plants, panels are like 25% efficient, you'd need to put most of it back into the LEDs to grow anything. Growing LEDs aren't your regular 5w home light bulbs, you need a lot of energy to grow plants
I find the physics of wavelength-dependent materials properties oddly satisfying. You can do clever things like this, extracting energy from different parts of the spectrum by combining materials and conversion processes. You can beam waste heat back to space through the atmosphere’s “infrared window”. You can explain global warming from first principles. Fascinating stuff!
I feel the same way about how fiber optics can create bandwidth by just slicing up the spectrum for different channels of data (my rudimentary understanding anyway). I like how even after all this time we find new and clever ways to work with light.
I'd love this for a home greenhouse... I live in an area where during the summer insolation is high enough that some combination of large amounts shading and airflow (wasting humidity) is needed... wavelength-selective shading seems like an interesting idea to start with, and energy recovery from it is a nice add-on.
So while broccoli yeilds may have "held steady," it's possible they could make even more gains elsewhere. So leafy vegetables like spinach might be doing equivalently fine under the magenta shades in New Jersey, but might actually be even better in Texas.
Lookup the energy needs to grow plants, panels are like 25% efficient, you'd need to put most of it back into the LEDs to grow anything. Growing LEDs aren't your regular 5w home light bulbs, you need a lot of energy to grow plants