"Plants need light to grow, and a world that requires more food needs light optimized towards agriculture. We are developing a transparent layer that can manipulate sunlight into light optimized for agriculture," says Arnon Lesage, researcher at the University of Amsterdam. He's talking about the innovation of the Dutch company SolarFoil, one of the winners of the Amsterdam Science Innovation Award.
"Sunlight contains useful light, but also harmful UV and green light which is not so efficiently used. Our nanotechnology allows us to modify sunlight and create a resulting light spectrum that increases crop yields. In the Lab we test this on micro-algae cultures, we see them growing 10-20% faster when under SolarFoil manipulated sunlight."
Arnon envisions SolarFoil tailored to different crops, to flowers to tomato’s, in greenhouses in polytunnels using only sunlight as it’s source, both increasing useful light in the Netherlands, and decreasing harmful light in sunny Spain.
In the video below he shows their technique.