Battery Powered Adaptive Grow Light System Aiming at Minimizing Cost and Environmental Impact from Electricity Use

Sammanfattning: With increasing popularity of indoor farming, more and more home growers are faced with sub-optimal lighting conditions in northern countries or poorly lit windows. We have designed and built a proof-of-concept system capable of reducing electricity cost and CO2 footprint of the electricity used for consumer grade grow lights without adversely impacting the grow cycle of the plant. Our system provides optimal grow light conditions for a given plant while using forecasts and live grid data from the ENTSO-E transparency platform to automatically use or store electricity during low-cost hours and avoid using grid electricity during high-cost hours, but can also be configured to prioritize electricity use when the available grid power’s carbon intensity is low. The system, consisting of a server and an embedded control unit, was designed and implemented according to Nunamaker and Chen’s five-step iterative systems development research method and later evaluated by simulating the system for 14 days using real world sunlight and grid data. The results of the simulation show a significant reduction in both spending and carbon emissions related to electricity use, with figures of 73% and 28%, respectively. However, when accounting for life-cycle cost and emissions from the battery, the prototype in its current configuration is neither profitable nor a net positive for the environment. With changes to battery type and taking advantage of economies of scale, a future version could be economically viable, but to be environmentally sustainable, further advances in eco-friendly battery production are needed.