Written by Sollum Technologies, a leader in advanced, 100% dynamic LED lighting solutions for commercial greenhouses and controlled environment agriculture (CEA)
Thirty years ago, greenhouse lighting was simple. A greenhouse grower turned fixtures on and off using timers, adding light when the sun went down and shutting it off when it came back.
Today, lighting systems behave more like software.
Advanced fixtures, mounted on the ceiling, adjust intensity based on live weather data, tracking energy tariffs, adjusting spectrum by crop zone, and learning from season to season.
What was once a passive input is now becoming an active variable in how crops are grown.
That transformation didn't happen overnight. It unfolded in four distinct generations:
The companies that recognized each transition early built lasting advantages. Sollum Technologies, which has a system-level approach from the outset, just launched a fixture, the SF-INFINITE™, that signals where greenhouse lighting may be heading next.
Here's how we got here.
For the better part of five decades, high-pressure sodium (HPS) lamps ruled the greenhouse. Adopted broadly from the 1960s onward, HPS fixtures offered relatively high luminous efficacy and were economically practical for large-scale supplemental lighting. Growers valued them for their ability to extend photoperiods and push yields through dark winter months, and research throughout the 1980s confirmed that supplemental HPS lighting could meaningfully improve tomato production.
But HPS had a fundamental limitation: it couldn't adapt.
Its spectral power distribution was fixed at manufacture, dominated by yellow-orange wavelengths that weren't optimized for plant photoreception. It ran on timers or manual schedules, blind to whether the sun was shining brightly outside or hidden behind three days of cloud cover.
The transition to LEDs marked a turning point. Early research demonstrated that LED arrays could deliver meaningful photosynthetic photon flux densities with a fraction of the mass and heat load of traditional lamps. Sustained horticultural LED R&D took root in the mid-1980s, progressing from simple red-only arrays toward multi-wavelength devices. The core advantage researchers kept returning to wasn't just efficiency, it was spectral composition control and digital integration.
Plants respond at the molecular level, through photoreceptors tuned to specific wavelength bands.
LEDs made it possible to control these variables directly. For the first time, growers could adjust not just how much light plants received, but what kind of light they received.
The first wave of LED systems introduced dimming without the warm-up delays or efficiency drops. This enabled what researchers called adaptive greenhouse supplemental control. Instead of running fixtures at full output, growers can adjust intensity in response to available sunlight, maintaining a target PPFD (Photosynthetic Photon Flux Density) setpoint rather than running a fixed on/off schedule.
The implications were economically significant. The logic is straightforward: if the sun is delivering 300 μmol/m²/s and your crop target is 400, you only supplement 100, rather than adding a full 400 on top. Dimmable LEDs made this continuous optimization possible in a way no previous fixture technology could.
This era also saw the rise of the key horticultural metrics that define the field today: PPFD (photon flux at the canopy), DLI (total photons delivered over a day), and PPE (Photosynthetic Photon Efficacy, μmol/J — essentially the photons-per-joule efficiency number that has become the industry's primary benchmark).
Dimming changed how much light plants received. Spectral tuning changed what kind of light they received. Multi-channel LED fixtures, with independently controlled red, blue, white, and far-red channels, enabled growers to program distinct "recipes": spectral profiles tailored to crop species, growth stage, and target quality outcomes.
A vegetative propagation recipe emphasizes blue-rich spectra to promote compact, well-rooted transplants. A fruiting tomato recipe shifts toward red-dominant output with strategic far-red supplementation to support fruit load. These were not theoretical possibilities, commercial tunable systems brought them into standard practice.
The current frontier goes beyond "set your recipe and run it." The most advanced systems today implement what researchers call closed-loop, predictive, multi-objective control, where lighting continuously adjusts based on a real-time stream of environmental data: sunlight intensity and spectral composition, temperature, relative humidity, VPD (vapor pressure deficit), CO₂ concentration, and even electricity market pricing.
This is the architecture that defines the state of the art: sensors feed data to a control layer, which runs rules-based, closed-loop, and predictive algorithms simultaneously, translating conditions into LED driver commands that flow to multi-channel fixtures, and crop response data feeds back to refine the model over time. Light is no longer a schedule. It is a climate input, co-optimized alongside temperature, humidity, and CO₂ to hit production targets at minimum energy cost.
Few companies have pursued this full trajectory as deliberately as Sollum Technologies. Founded in 2015, Sollum was built around the idea that the future of greenhouse lighting is software-defined.
Sollum’s system is a 100% dynamic LED system that modulates the full spectrum of natural sunlight, positioning light as a controllable biological input.
Across commercial deployments, this approach has translated into measurable gains including increased yield and significant energy savings: : tomato yields up 19.5%, mini cucumbers up 16%, peppers up 22%, and documented energy savings up to 56.8% compared to conventional approaches.
In February 2026, Sollum launched the SF-INFINITE™, a system that reflects the culmination of this industry’s evolution
The SF-INFINITE is designed as a platform rather than a single fixture. Featuring up to four independently controlled spectral channels, it enables crop-specific lighting strategies that can be adjusted zone by zone across an entire greenhouse. Seamlessly connected to Sollum's AI-powered SUNaaS™ platform, the SF-INFINITE delivers real-time control of spectrum, intensity, timing, and DLI from a unified software environment. Unlimited lighting zones. Propagation optimization. Tariff-aware dimming that responds to live energy pricing.
What distinguishes the SF-INFINITE is what lives inside the fixture itself: edge computing and telemetry at the fixture level. The SF-INFINITE functions as an intelligent node on the greenhouse ceiling—capable of processing and executing lighting logic even when cloud connectivity is interrupted, ensuring uninterrupted production continuity. It effectively behaves as a computer overhead, using AI to analyze weather patterns, energy consumption, and crop data to improve its recommendations over time.
Critically, the platform is designed to evolve without requiring hardware replacement. Automatic SUNaaS upgrades deliver continuous performance improvements as new crop models, spectral strategies, and energy optimization algorithms are developed which safeguards grower investments against the technological obsolescence that has made prior-generation systems expensive over time.
The SF-INFINITE debuted at the Leamington Greenhouse Grower Expo, demonstrating its capabilities across cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, and propagation crops.
In an industry where lighting represents one of the largest operating costs a commercial greenhouse will face, Sollum's SF-INFINITE marks the point where the evolution of LED technology arrives at its logical destination: not a fixture you buy, but a system that learns.
What is the difference between dimmable, tunable, and dynamic LED lighting for greenhouses?
Dimmable LEDs can adjust intensity (how much light), which enables adaptive strategies that match supplemental output to available sunlight and hit daily photon targets without waste. Tunable systems add the ability to change spectrum, the color mix of light, usually via multiple independently controlled LED channels, allowing growers to program crop-specific recipes.
Dynamic systems go further still: they adjust both intensity and spectrum continuously in response to real-time environmental data (sunlight, temperature, CO₂, energy pricing), and integrate sensing, computation, and actuation into a closed-loop system.
Plants use specific wavelength bands for distinct biological purposes.
Savings depend heavily on control strategy, climate, and crop. Sollum Technologies has documented energy savings up to 56.8% across commercial deployments, with the combination of high-efficiency fixtures and intelligent control strategies accounting for the gains.
DLI stands for Daily Light Integral, the total number of photons delivered to the canopy over an entire day, measured in mol/m²/day. It is essentially the "daily dose" of photosynthetically active light a crop receives from both sunlight and supplemental fixtures combined. DLI is the central planning metric in commercial greenhouse production because it directly predicts crop performance: most fruiting vegetables and leafy crops have well-characterized DLI targets, and shortfalls lead to reduced yield or quality while excess wastes energy.
Sollum's differentiation lies in the integration depth of its approach. Where most manufacturers produce fixtures that growers configure and manage manually, Sollum built its entire product architecture around software-defined, AI-powered control from day one. The SUNaaS platform provides a unified management layer across spectrum, intensity, timing, zoning, and energy optimization, with the SF-INFINITE adding edge computing at the fixture level so the system can operate autonomously even without cloud connectivity. The platform upgrades automatically over time, meaning growers benefit from new crop models and optimization algorithms without purchasing new hardware. Combined with proven commercial results, yield improvements across tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers alongside energy savings above 50%, Sollum occupies a position at the intersection of horticultural science and intelligent infrastructure that distinguishes it from fixture-only suppliers.
*This article was sponsored by Sollum Technologies.