Sollum Technologies Adds New Features to Its SUN as a Service Platform

By Greenhouse Grower staff|April 19, 2024

Sollum Technologies has unveiled the latest enhancements to its SUN as a Service (SUNaaS) cloud platform. The SUNaaS platform is at the heart of Sollum’s revolution in greenhouse lighting. Reproducing and modulating natural sunlight, it manages its unique dynamic/adaptive, fully programmable LED lighting in a way that meets the specific needs of any crop, at every stage of growth. This innovation enhances crop yield and quality, and by significantly reducing energy consumption, it offers a sustainable solution that addresses key challenges of modern greenhouse cultivation.

Designed with precision in mind, these enhancements to the SUNaaS platform bring an increased level of control and efficiency to greenhouse operations, reinforcing Sollum’s commitment to helping growers optimize their operations through 100% adaptable lighting technology.

What’s New

Power management: Advanced controls provide a comprehensive overview of a greenhouse’s lighting environment, adding to the flexibility of the solution to adapt to crop and business needs.
SUNaaS monitoring: Tracking the electricity usage of each fixture, each zone or the entire greenhouse allows growers to assess the impact of supplemental light on each crop’s productivity and implement strategic adjustments to the light recipe in order to conserve energy.
Energy cost controls: The SUNaaS platform enables the implementation of an electricity cap to mitigate the impact of “load shedding”. This proactive measure helps manage both peak consumption and high-cost periods more efficiently. Given the particular challenges load shedding presents to greenhouse growers, who require consistent energy use to maintain optimal growing conditions, this cap offers a dynamic control over energy expenditure. The flexibility to modify the cap at any time ensures that growers can adjust their energy use in response to both planned and unexpected load-shedding events, minimizing their impact on operations.
Enhanced lighting control: Multi-target PPFD (Photosynthetic Photon Flux Density) and DLI (Daily Light Integral) data provide additional control to help maximize the use of natural sunlight. The data serves to adjust the light quantity to meet the plants’ varying needs throughout the day, and ensures that crops receive the exact amount of light necessary for optimal growth.
Enhanced Recipe manager: Empowering growers to take charge, the recipe manager allows for the creation of their own light recipes — either independently or with the assistance of Sollum’s 24/7 Smart Support team. Recipe ownership remains with the growers, fostering innovation and real-time optimization.

Additionally, growers can select and customize recipes developed by Sollum in its extensive library. The latest update includes detailed recipe information such as R/G/B/FR distribution, color ratios, and power usage at any given time of day, alongside total energy consumption over selected periods. This level of detail extends to the comprehensive spectral composition, ensuring that growers have all the information to make informed decisions.

“These new features are more than significant improvements to the SUNaaS cloud platform,” says Vice President Marco Lafond, Product Development at Sollum. “We’re transforming the way growers interact with the technology, ensuring that their crops achieve unparalleled results. These advances reflect our unwavering commitment to providing an innovative and user-centric solution that meets the immediate needs of today’s growers and prepares them for tomorrow’s challenges, especially as it relates to the cost efficiency of energy management.”

Sollum is already looking ahead with a series of transformative features to be announced later this year — each one carefully designed to provide greenhouse growers with the most advanced tools supporting the efficiency and control of their operations.