A high-tech lighting system that mimics the huge variety of sunlight — manufactured by Edmonton company G2V and developed in a University of Alberta lab by research scientist Michael Taschuk —  is now being tested in four cannabis grow operations across Canada.

Travis George of Endless Sky Cannabis in British Columbia has been testing high-end lighting systems for three years but found the G2V lights grow cannabis plants much faster. “It’s an Alberta-manufactured product that exceeds all other lighting on the market … It kicked their asses.”

The G2V lighting system wasn’t developed to grow plants. Instead it was built to test solar cells at the U of A’s National Institute of Nanotechnology. The goal with solar cells is to get even slight increases in efficiency. This makes it necessary to have extremely precise diagnostic tools for taking measurements, including lamps that mimic the sunlight as it’s experienced on the Earth’s surface in all its variety, hot and cold, bright and dim, and everything in between.

Plants are highly sensitive to light and are able to detect time of day and time of year through it. “Because we have absolute control over the light and what the plant sees, we can manipulate the growth modes.”

See the original article at Edmonton Journal