Optimal performance of horticultural lighting systems boosts competitive advantage of your indoor cultivation facility. There are diverse strategies and many types of equipment you can use to accomplish your goals. The crops you grow - food, floriculture, or cannabis - influence your controlled environment agriculture (CEA) lighting system approaches. Understand the process application for your lighting and control systems to choose efficient lighting products, reduce energy use and operating costs for resilient indoor operations, and maximize incentives from your local utilities and efficiency programs.
Topical areas include:
How CEA Crops Use Light
Benefits of Using LED Lighting
Optimizing Lighting System Design
Maximizing Financial Incentives for CEA Lighting
LED Lighting Best Practices for Vertical Farming
Automating Indoor Cultivation with Lighting Controls
Commissioning Sole-Source Lighting Controls
Benchmarking Lighting System KPIs
Target audience:
Cultivators
Operations & Facility Staff
Design & Construction Partners
Property Owners
Utility & Government Representatives
Funded with support from your local utilities and efficiency programs: | ![]() |
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Michigan Efficient Yields: Lighting Best Practices for Efficient Indoor Agriculture (21.8 MB) | Download |
Dr. Sanaz Jarolmasjed has PhD in Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering from Washington State University. She has over five years of experience applying image processing and data analysis to solve challenging problems in agriculture. She is an established contributor to high-throughput phenotyping research with ten peer-reviewed publications accumulating ~600 citations.
As director of machine vision and biological systems at Agnetix, she is responsible for new developments including vision, environmental and plant sensing, and data management components.
Gretchen is a professional engineer who has spent the past five years optimizing controlled environment agriculture operations for resource efficiency and productivity. Schimelpfenig earned a B.S. in Architectural Engineering from the University of Wyoming and an M.S. in Civil Engineering, Sustainable Design & Construction with a concentration in energy from Stanford University. Her diverse professional experience includes time spent commissioning commercial buildings, designing utility energy efficiency programs, and helping businesses like the University of Vermont and the City of Burlington benchmark their resource consumption. She specializes in analyzing the operation of building systems for cultivation facilities and helps the members of RII’s Utility Working Group reach cultivators with their financial incentives and technical assistance.
She has consulted across the U.S. on efficiency program design for controlled environment agriculture (CEA), and has published papers on benchmarking and high-performance technologies with ACEEE, ASABE, and USGBC. Gretchen has presented at conferences for industry organizations including ACEEE, AESP, ASHRAE, EUCI, MEEA, and IES.
She works directly with the DesignLights Consortium to increase the adoption of third-party certification of horticultural building systems. Gretchen also represents RII on several industry committees developing standards for CEA including the ASABE PAFS-30 (Plant Systems Group), ES-300 (Electrical Utilization & Energy Group), and ES-310 (Agricultural Lighting Group), ASHRAE Technical Committee 2.2 (Plant and Animal Environments), ASTM Committee D37 on Cannabis, IES Horticultural Lighting Subcommittee, and Task Group 1 of the UL 3600 Scorecard for Measuring and Reporting Circular Economy Aspects of Products, Sites and Organizations.
Gretchen raises houseplants and cats in her Vermont farmhouse and enjoys foraging for ramps, fiddleheads, and mushrooms when she isn’t skiing, biking, or knitting.
Founder and President of TSRgrow, Mikhail Sagal is a veteran of the cannabis industry. With over 12 years of experience in LED lighting solutions and over 29 issued patents, Mikhail is a pioneer in LED lighting and has a proven track record of product innovation and commercialization, as demonstrated by TSRgrow’s TOTALgrow™ Solution.
A longtime player in the space, Mikhail believes the key to success in an increasingly competitive industry is maintaining the culture of collaboration that growers and suppliers have valued for so long. It’s this passion for shared success that has made TSRgrow a trusted partner to commercial growers. With his unique expertise and industry knowledge, Mikhail is frequently called upon to present at industry events and conferences.
Prior to founding TSRgrow in 2009, Mikhail worked for 13 years developing and commercializing thermally conductive plastics with companies worldwide. His technical experience includes thermal management, LED system and product design, manufacturing systems, design for manufacturing, wireless control system and applications in solid state lighting. It was his early understanding of the power of LEDs that led Mikhail to founding TSRgrow, quickly expanding the company beyond lighting to deliver a full horticultural growing solution.