If you can genetically engineer a more efficient plant for growing in a field, you can genetically engineer a plant that's more efficient to grow under LEDs, no? I don't see how a hypothetical breakthrough in generic engineering makes vertical farming a mad fantasy. There are certain crops that can't be grown in high yield monocultures and have to be transported from other parts of the world. I'm sure there are many cases where the math works, and I don't think most people are talking about growing corn indoors when they talk about vertical farming.

If a genetically engineered plant gathered energy equally across the full spectrum then frequency shifting using solar > LED is absolutely pointless even at 100% efficiency. Solar panels and leaves are solving the same problem using the same physical laws.

But that’s hardly required as solar panels to LED’s can’t reach 100% efficiency. Further, the limited lifespan of solar panels and LED’s means you need to cover their construction etc which requires resources.

Ultimately, looking at theoretical limits it’s simply a net loss.

PS: Monoculture is far from required, it’s an outgrowth of current automation rather than having any theoretical advantage.

There is no need to breed plants specifically for LED lights. All the newest and most efficient and cost effective LEDs are white spectrum now and emulate the sun far closer than any other light ever has. What matters is how efficiently can you make the lights run, and right now it is pretty damn good getting about 200 lumens per watts on those grow LEDs (versus about half that for a shitty standard household LED)

Isn't it counterproductive to waste LEDs optimized for our perception to plant growth which doesn't fully utilize the spectrum of sunlight? I thought that is WHY grow lights have this purple sheen, be it traditional flourescent ones, or contemporary LEDs, or a mix of red and blue ones.

Despite the 'common knowledge', plants do utilize most of the visible light spectrum, even green, just in different amounts. And on top of that these white LEDs aren't just a single static white, their light spectrum are tuned to specific growth spectrum and can be ordered however you want, but all come out visibly to us as white of slightly different shades.

Those blurple lights are just awful, and not only do the LEDs have far less energy efficiency being old tech, but their supposed "optimal" wavelengths are anything but. They are blasting out extremely narrow wavelengths of light and trying to make it more continuous by using a bunch of slightly different narrow range colors, but it doesn't work as well as one would hope, especially when they are coming from different point sources.