2050 LED lighting helps to feed 10 billion people?
The lighting market is very diverse, but LED-based solid-state lighting (SSL) has broken through traditional light bulbs, making Edison bulbs obsolete, and SSL is also invading the fluorescent market. The possibilities offered by SSL not only bring lighting advantages to industrial applications such as roads, parking lots, stadiums and stages, but also bring such advantages to urban agriculture, horticulture, water purification, medical lighting and light therapy.
At the intersection of electronics and photons, power supply designers and LED manufacturers need to work closely together. The so-called "GaN" illumination is an example of the use of gallium nitride transistors in the power stage and the silicon gallium nitride process in the LED elements. While this is an interesting story, it reflects the industry maturity that GaN uses in the power and lighting industries. As a power supply design engineer, it is necessary to focus on these two technologies, and it is foreseeable that the combination of these two technologies will bring huge benefits.
SSL lighting currently has an edge in some areas of the lighting market - in these areas, replacing a light bulb can be very expensive and may cost the end user more than the light bulb itself. For example, a pole that is too high may require the use of a lift to get to the fixture. As another example, replacing a light bulb on a bridge or in a tunnel must suspend or change the traffic route. The persistence features of SSL can benefit these types of applications. In addition, SSL is much more efficient than typical high-voltage lamps that they will replace, so power consumption can be significantly reduced when the same brightness is provided, which typically results in a very good return on investment for end users. It will make a great contribution to reducing energy consumption.
Another example is the NRG Stadium in Houston, USA, which became one of the first professional venues to use LED energy-saving lamps in 2015. The on-site lighting is provided by 65,000 LED lights, consuming 337kW at full power! Although this appears to be a large energy consumption, it saves about 60% of the electricity compared to previous systems using traditional stadium lighting, and is expected to achieve a 75% energy savings goal in the future. Although energy savings are significant, this is just the beginning of an endless combination of SSL technology and efficient power management. More and more large infrastructure and cities are replacing old lighting systems with digitally controlled SSL. With the use of renewable energy, we are approaching the myth of zero-emission lighting processes (from power generation to electricity use).
Provide lighting for everyone's food!
There are now about 7.6 billion people in the world, and the annual population of the world is increasing by 83 million. By 2050, this number will be close to 10 billion. Providing food for 10 billion people requires agriculture to have a very efficient production model while protecting the environment by reducing the generation of harmful chemicals and optimizing water resources.
In a recent paper, the World Bank is a good illustration of the food supply situation around the world and its expectations for the future. “By 2050, at least 50% more food will be needed to feed 10 billion people. But climate change will reduce crop yields by more than 25%. Land, biodiversity, oceans, forests and other forms of natural resources are at an unprecedented rate. Depletion. Unless we change the way we grow food and manage natural resources, food security - especially for the world's poorest countries - will be at risk.”
Taking into account the environmental impact of parameters and requirements in food production, Dr. Dickson Despommier and his students proposed the concept of modern indoor agriculture in 1999, reviving the term “stereo agriculture” created by American geologist Gilbert Ellis Bailey in 1915. ". We've all heard of it, read a lot about turning industrial buildings into three-dimensional farms, but from the early use of fluorescent or halogen lamps to SSL, a lot of technological innovations help optimize the energy provided to plants in order to achieve optimal health. Long and achieve double the benefits of indoor agriculture. In terms of space utilization, compared with conventional agriculture, indoor agriculture produces 100 times more food per square meter, while water use is reduced by 90%, and harmful chemicals are reduced to zero, so it is very attractive, but to be truly efficient, this kind of agriculture requires a very efficient lighting system.
Not all vegetables can grow under limited soil and nutrient conditions, but for vegetables that apply to this farming method, the effect is astounding, and when using computer-controlled modern lighting technology (this is for power supply designers) It is a very interesting area of ??exploration, and when combined with advanced power electronics and modern agriculture and software, the effect is even more shocking.
Since the introduction of this concept, indoor agricultural engineers have conducted research to verify the spectrum and energy required for efficient growth of different plants. From broad-spectrum fluorescent lamps or halogen lamps to narrow-spectrum lamps, the traditional lighting industry has made a number of innovations, but these technologies are not flexible enough to meet demand.
Following experiments conducted in Japan in 2005-2008, agronomic researchers studied different lighting methods, adjusting spectra and energy to adapt to specific plants. The researchers concluded that the specific spectrum of plants and vegetables is usually from 450 nm (blue light) to 730 nm (far red light). Photosynthetic photon flux density (PPFD) is required to range from 50 micromolar for mushrooms to 2000 micromolar for plants such as tomatoes, and some flowers can thrive in all daylight. Agricultural experts tell us that in order to achieve optimal results, different plant species may require different spectra, as well as different light balances and intensities, from seedling to maturity. This typically requires artificial light to have many different spectral channels and the intensity can be adjusted separately.
Urban farms are turning to modern SSL lighting, especially as the energy efficiency of light sources increases steadily. This synergy also reduces cooling costs because excessive air or soil temperatures can have a negative impact on production. LED lighting allows growers to use only the light of the spectral energy required by the plant (usually red and blue) without having to provide full-spectrum illumination to waste most of the light that plants cannot use, saving energy. This may remind you that when you were in elementary school, ask the teacher, "Why is the plant green?" (If you have never asked this question, then the answer is that most plants do not absorb (use) green light, so it reflects into your eyes and makes the plants look green.)
Today, a variety of LED lights are widely used for the efficient growth of vegetables, and the integration of smart power into LED modules can make greater progress. One of the research areas is to create miniature LED panels with growth index monitoring that can locally modulate light (1/2 m2 area). This requires a very efficient distributed power solution that can adjust all parameters for "vegetable growth". Here, electronics and photons have a new direction: "Providing sustainable food for us and future generations."
Although a large number of articles and papers have been published at various conferences, indoor agriculture is still in its infancy; requiring more agricultural production and less impact on the environment is an important factor in the development of “urban agriculture”. Combining the latest technologies in SSL, power management and software-controlled environments will help improve the productivity and tools of modern farmers, growing food for 10 billion people in 2050.