It's pretty clear LED's will displace HID's within a decade as current first generation dies or chips clearly exceed in performance any HID by a long shot. At this point is not affordable but soon it will and the game will change.
I don't think its so clear that LED panels will entirely displace HID lighting for growing plants in the next ten years, and in fact, I doubt it.
HID lights have many merits, including simplicity, universal availability, high durability, low conspicuousness (you can adapt industrial lights for growing purposes), and low cost.
If something goes wrong with an HID lamp, fixing it may be as simple as a trip to Home Depot. Not so with electronics panels. A lot more HID lights are being built for non-growing applications (to light parking lots, warehouses, etc), than for growing ones, and there are a lot of these lamps still in active service. Wide use OUTSIDE of a growing context help keep down costs, and ensure that physical HID lights will be around for the foreseeable future.
While LEDs will probably continue to improve and increase in popularity for all sorts of lighting applications over the next decade, including growing, I think the above factors mean for at least some growers and some applications, there will be plenty of good reasons to continue to choose HPS lights for certain growing applications in that time.
I want to through [sic] this idea out there, a LASER (Light Amplification [oscillation] by Stimulated Emission or Radiation) grow light.
While I think such a thing probably is technically possible, there are MANY problems with a commercially viable LASER powered grow light system, including cost, complexity, and safety.
It would only make sense to use such a system if there were a significant advantage over alternate systems, including LED, HID, plasma, and other systems. And whatever advantages there were in growing would also have to be weighed against what would undoubtedly be significant reliability and cost disadvantages, if you're talking about an actual product in the marketplace where a grower might actually be in a position to consider buying one.
In particular, I am wondering what real world advantage going with a laser light system would have over more traditional ones. Ultimately a laser diode is just a variant of a more conventional LED diode. . .a more complex and expensive variant. So I think anything you might want to TRY to do with lasers, you could probably end up doing quite a bit cheaper with conventional LEDs.
Intensity is one advantage like the sun's rays the coherent light can be sharply focused, there would be less wasted scattered light and deep light penetration.
Intensity is equivalent to light energy put out. If you want something putting out *watts* of energy to grow a plant canopy (let alone dozens or hundreds of watts), then you'll either needs hundred of thousands of small lasers, or alternatively one really big one. The latter would be classified as a "class IV" laser device, something that requires fairly involved safety engineering and precautions, adding to liability, complexity, and (especially) cost.
In terms of wastage, its not clear to me that laser light being dispersed over a field is going be any more. . .or less. . .efficient than any directed light source over the same area. The biggest advantage of laser light is that you can make the beam super NARROW. For the specific application of growing plants, where you need to disperse the light over a broad canopy, I don't think lasers really add much.
Rather than pure beam focus, I think the more important factor is just simple energy efficiency. . .how much of the electricity going in is actually being converted to photosynthetically useful light.
In that regard, again I don't think laser diodes are much (if any) more energy efficient than conventional LED diodes, though I know for sure that the laser diodes are quite a bit more expensive and fragile. They'd have to be a LOT more efficient than LEDs to justify the other disadvantages.
A die with perhaps hundred or so different wavelengths to cover the spectrum would have to be made.
With this it would be possible to have precise control over each wavelengths intensity enabling efficiencies not possible at this time.
I don't think so. Laser light is typically monochromatic, though it can be polychromatic.
If you wanted 10 frequencies with monochromatic light, you'll need to run 10 lasers simultaneously. If you want 100 individual wavelengths, well, now you need 100 separate individual frequency lasers, adding TWO orders of magnitude to your system cost, etc. Note that like with traditional LED diodes, not every frequency is readily available in laser diode form.
If, instead of monochromatic lasers, you're running one (or more than one) that puts out a wide spectrum of light, there goes your energy efficiency. I think in practice the cost of these sorts of lasers would be prohibitive anyway.
In any case, I don't see how you're going to take one broad spectrum light source, then precisely alter filter intensity of ten different frequencies all at once. If you could do that with a broad spectrum "white" laser, then you should be able to do it with an HPS or plasma light too, by the way.
[/quote]With the precise manipulation of the timing and spectra - different yields, flower times and quality of bud could be realized. Effects currently unknown could be achieved.[/QUOTE]
A little hyperbolic, I think.
At least to some extent, altering yields and flowering times is as easy as slightly changing photoperiod. That literally requires no additional investment in hardware or technology. . .you just reprogram the timer you already have!
I don't think you can alter flowering period by changing light spectra. (And again, even if there were true, its not clear to me how lasers help you here, let alone how they help you over just adjusting your timer).
Maybe by precisely fine-tuning spectral output you could optimize power use for veg and flowering, but again, why can't you just do that with conventional LEDs cheaper?
In short, I don't think lasers really "buy" you that much in the context of growing.
