Microalgae cultivation holds great promise for the production of high value–added biomolecules, bioenergy, and more. To grow microalgae in photobioreactors, artificial lighting systems must be used. These lighting systems are important to ensuring productivity and decrease production costs.
I do not understand the economic feasibility if you want to use algae for bioenergy production. Using energy for producing energy looks strange. Do you have other valuable products or you use sunlight for the photosynthesis and LED is just for optimizing the yield?
To turn fossil energy to bioenergy is not a viable economic pathway and sounds questionable.
Through various combinations of LEDs it may be possible to optimize the spectral distribution(s) needed by plants/algae in their development and growth, especially if different distributions are needed/desired at different times of the day. Further, LEDs continue to increase in efficiency so as Ramón Piloto pointed out, the costs to supply lighting with LEDs will continue to decrease.
I agree with John D. Bullough. Only several points should be added. They are: the light for Microalge should be not constant, but it should blink with a suitable frequency. In addition, the brightness, the combination with color spectra, the combination of frequencies for each channel are needed to be researched futher. A LED-luminaire optimized on every aspect can be realized. We are doing it.
With algal cultures, I think there is still allot of work to be done with the new LED's. Some do not appear to penetrate the culture, or culture vessel, very well. Others do not appear to have much intensity. They do cost less than fluorescent lighting but electricity is still a significant cost in algal culturing no matter which you use. Usually, using daylight and supplementing with electricity is where people tend to go for production cultures.
Most advantageous production system may be to use a red light initially to produce the desired cell concentration, then switch to a blue light to increase cell size.
Article Use of Red and Blue Light-Emitting Diodes (LED) and Fluoresc...
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