[kibwen]

> plants are more efficient at capturing energy from the sun than solar panels -> light bulbs -> plants are

This is a counterintuitive misconception that I mention elsewhere in this thread. Plants aren't optimized for raw sunlight utilization, because that's not the bottleneck for growth or survival. Plants deliberately reflect away 90% of the sun's energy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency) because other factors are more important: https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants-green-to-reduc...

[falcolas]

> deliberately reflect away 90% of the sun's energy

They'll have that same efficiency with artificial lighting too… At least until our grow lights stop emitting light in the green spectrum (not something I expect to see anytime soon).

[kibwen]

Grow lights are quite good at only emitting light in certain parts of the spectrum, and have been for some time now.

[falcolas]

Just looking at some spectrum charts for grow lights... They certainly vary, but not in any uniform fashion.

There is an exception to this: there is a standard LED graph which shows up quite frequently, identified by it's peeks in the deep reds, yellow, and dark blue, with a marked trough at cyan.