DC meets greenhouse horticulture: Improving performance of HPS lighting

摘要

Electrification of transportation, communication, working and living continues worldwide. Televisions, telephones, servers are an important part of everyday life. These loads and most sustainable sources as well, have one thing in common: Direct Current. Together, they change the behavior of our electricity grid, not all effects are beneficial. In densely populated areas the AC transport and distribution grids are facing more and more stability and reliability issues. The Dutch Greenhouse Horticultural Sector, whilst using Combined Heat and Power (CHP), is one of the instigators. This paper then introduces an innovation and entrepreneurial educational programme. This programme aims at strengthening multidisciplinary collaboration between enterprise, education and research. In four recent years, students, researchers and entrepreneurs worked together, amongst others to establish the potential of the application of Direct Current in High Pressure Sodium (HPS) lighting for greenhouses. The paper firstly discusses the most important results and products. Secondly the paper illustrates the influence of prolonged student involvement for innovative SME's. The paper continues to show the effects of such collaboration and its results on regional and national economic growth. The paper then introduces a new research and educational programme. This programme aims at creating knowledge and strong networks to transfer knowledge from knowledge institutes to locally and regionally operating SME's to improve their innovative capacity and maintain their competitive advantage.