Light Emitting Diode – The reason that I am writing about LEDs and am so excited about their potential, is that they are the way of the future for indoor gardening of a scale that can re-purpose existing buildings in order to have Sustainable Agriculture in cold climates. I am the Director and Worldwide Partner for Every Watt Matters, the largest LED service provider.
While we have seen LEDs around for some time, only in the last few years were we able to get an acceptable grow light that will give the spectrums that are needed for successful indoor growing. The Nobel Prize for physics was just given to Nakamora for the blue LED. Why this is a big deal is that prior to this there were just green and red LEDs. Until Nakamora came up with a rare-earth metal Gallium to form the crystals needed to throw off Protons in the blue spectrum, there were no white LEDs. By combining the new blue LED with the red and green, the full spectrum is available to imitate white light. This is just in the last five years that LEDs were capable of white light, and thus commercially successful! Just 18 months ago, we were all waiting for the magic milestone of being able to commercially generate 100 lumens per watt. We were able to source bulbs that created 100 lumens per watt in January of 2014 and are now seeing the top end bulbs generating 140 lumens per watt. What this means is that we can now produce bulbs that use 20% (or less) of the power and last for over 22 years – 70,000 to 100,000 hours.
What this means for Sustainable Agriculture is that we can now affordably and effectively grow indoors. However, the new problems are that now that we can give the plants the spectrum of lights they want, we don't know what they want! They just won't tell us! The simple history of indoor growing is to use Metal Halide or other Edison type of lights, which are inefficient (costly) and create so much heat that they burn the plants. Plants have always been able to reach into the spectrums of white light and pull out whatever they need, LEDs are manufactured to produce specific spectrums of light, and in order to match the plant's requirements with the lighting is a trial-and-error process. It is certainly more scientific than that, but we are now finding out that plants are all different in the way they use light in different growing periods. The good thing is that the newest gangbuster of Cash Crop is Marijuana. This is forcing an incredible amount of sceintific research into lighting requirements for all crops.
We are indeed on the precipice of an indoor growing revolution, which will change the way organic gardening uses lighting. Indoor growing is going to be economical within the next 10 years!
