"Advancements in LED will have major impact on horticulture"

With a PhD in materials science from the University of California-Santa Barbara, Morgan Pattison has long believed that light emitting diodes (LEDs) were going to eventually dominate the illumination market. His thesis research advisor was Dr. Shuji Nakamura who invented the blue LED. Nakamura received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2014 for his invention.

“Professor Nakamura was instrumental in showing me the importance of this technology and this put me in a good position to be involved with LED research,” said Pattison.

Pattison started Solid State Lighting Services Inc. in 2008. The company, which focuses on LED lighting, provides technical consulting to other companies and organizations assisting in understanding how the technology of LEDs fits together.

In January 2018, DOE released a horticultural lighting energy report, Energy Savings Potential of SSL in Horticultural Applications. Pattison, who was one of the coauthors of the report, said the publication addresses the energy implications for horticultural lighting and transitioning it from conventional sources to LEDs.

“I engage with horticultural experts in talks and meetings to try to connect them with my understanding of LED technologies so that they can make informed research decisions,” he said. “There is a lot of information floating around about horticultural lighting. Because there are not a lot of defined characterization standards, it is more difficult to debunk some of the claims being made.

“From a market perspective or a consumer perspective, having more comparable performance of products is important, and that requires test standards. Everybody needs to be speaking the same language in terms of test characterization standards for products. This is something that happened very similarly with general illumination. Before there were standards that were applicable to LED lighting, there were all sorts of wild claims from lighting producers that really kind of flooded the market and slowed down the adoption of the technology. That is a market need that exists for horticulture. The standards for LEDs are what A.J. Both at Rutgers University has been working on. He got the idea from the existing lighting label for general illumination. LED lighting for general illumination went through the same growing pains that are now occurring with LED horticultural lighting.”

Read more at Cornell University (David Kuack)