Optimizing greenhouse lighting for advanced agriculture based on real time electricity market price

Abstract

The world's growing demand for food can bemet by agricultural technology. Use of artificial light to supplement natural sunlight in greenhouse cultivation is one of themost common techniques to increase greenhouse production of food crops. However, artificial light requires significant electrical energy,which increases the cost of greenhouse production and can reduce profit.This papermodels the increments to greenhouse productivity aswell as the increases in cost fromsupplemental electric lighting, in a situationwhere the greenhouse is one of the elements of a smart grid, a system where the electric energy market is dynamic and prices vary over time.We used our models to calculate the optimum values for supplemental light and the required electrical energy for HPS lamps in the greenhouse environment, using cherry tomato cultivation as a case study crop.We considered two optimization techniques: iterative search (IS) and genetic algorithm (GA).The two approaches produced similar results, although the GA method wasmuch faster. Both approaches verify the advantages of using optimal supplemental light in terms of increasing production and hence profit.