LED Grow Lights With Solar Panels More Effective Than The Sun?

Ok I'm a complete newbie to growing with grow lights, and growing in general, but I have been doing quite a bit of research over the past few days on the merits of using LED lights to grow plants and the prospects of using solar panels to generate the electricity to use those grow lights which has highlighted some interesting results.

Firstly solar panels, from what I have gathered, a fairly standard solar panel setup produces around 1kwh/day/m2.

Secondly, from what I have gathered (or at least what LED light producers are claiming) these new LED grow lights are capable of providing sufficient light to facilitate good plant growth with as little as 10 watts per m2, which would imply that with 16 hours of grow light operation a day someone would be able to grow at least 6 m2 of plants for each m2 of solar panel!

Am I missing something or is it looking like in the future that we will be utilising sunlight via solar panels prior to delivering it more efficiently to plants via LEDs to facilitate multiple layers of growing on each square meter?

Obviously at the present time it's still not cost effective to do this given the massive capital costs for both solar panels and LED lights, nonetheless it is looking like both solar panels and LED lighting technology are both improving in quality and falling in price with each passing month.

So will this be the future? are people doing this now? thoughts?

 

I been thinkin' the same thing:>)

 

Cheap solar panels only really any good for trickle charging.
Question led run from a transformer coz there dc so a led rated at say 5 watts will actually use more like 6 watts due to the dc transformer?

 

Yeah! and batteries lots o' batteries for storage thus the cost prohition:>)

 

Getting better but batteries not that eco friendly to make and dispose of.

 

Maybe it isn't completely cost efficient yet when you just consider the monetary aspect; however, I think that the added security (for non medical grows) more than makes up for the money part. Think about it, one of the major ways they detect growers is by their power usage. If you go off grid no one can detect energy consumption. I just bought some LED grow lights from Guru Grow Lights and so far they are growing pretty well. I moved off grid last year and the savings in power when compared to HPS is awesome. I can grow three times as much with the same amount of solar panels.