HPS heat and HVAC load
Power demands across a growing facility
Consistent quality at commercial scale“Cannara needed more than a fixture replacement. They needed a lighting platform capable of delivering higher light levels while reducing electricity consumption and HVAC demand. RAPTR allowed the team to leverage much of the existing infrastructure, simplify the retrofit, and create more consistent growing environments that support commercial-scale cannabis production.”
“We saw the results with the Fluence lights on our grow. The cost savings from the electricity standpoint, as well as the yield and the quality, checked all the boxes — and that’s why we made the decision to be a Fluence shop at Valleyfield.”
In Canada’s competitive cannabis market, Cannara Biotech has built its business around disciplined scale, low-cost production, and affordable premium products that continue to earn consumer loyalty at retail. As the market has matured, licensed producers have faced increasing pressure to control costs, improve consistency, and deliver products that stand out in a competitive marketplace.
Headquartered in Montréal, Québec, Cannara is a vertically integrated licensed producer with two major cultivation facilities in Farnham (indoor) and Valleyfield (hybrid greenhouse). Together, the facilities span more than 1.6 million square feet and provide Cannara with a path toward 100,000 kg of potential annualized cultivation output. With consumer brands including Tribal, Nugz, and Orchid CBD, Cannara has established itself as one of Canada’s fastest-growing cannabis operators by combining product quality, operational discipline, and a strong value proposition.
As Cannara continued scaling its platform, lighting became a critical part of its production strategy. The company needed a solution that could support higher usable light levels, reduce heat generation and HVAC demand associated with HPS fixtures, and deliver more consistent growing conditions throughout its cultivation facilities.
By retrofitting HPS rooms with Fluence RAPTR fixtures, Cannara created a more consistent and energy-efficient lighting platform that supports commercial-scale production while reducing power consumption and HVAC demand. . Across its Farnham facility, Cannara converted 18 rooms with 80 Fluence RAPTRs per room, helping the team reduce power and HVAC constraints while creating more consistent growing environments. The retrofit provided a standardized lighting platform that delivers consistent environmental conditions across cultivation rooms while reducing operational constraints associated with HPS fixtures.
For Cannara, the value of Fluence lights is not simply energy efficiency. It is the ability to support a disciplined, scalable cultivation model where consistency, efficiency, and economics all matter. After seeing the impact of Fluence LEDs on crop performance, energy use, environmental control, and operational consistency, Cannara made the decision to fully convert its available 600,000 square foot canopy at their Valleyfield facility to Fluence lights as part of its broader hybrid greenhouse platform.
RAPTR LEDs
Cannara’s cultivation strategy depends on precision, repeatability, and consistency. In a market where consumers expect consistent quality and retailers reward strong sell-through, the company must maintain control from clone production through harvest. Every part of that process matters, from genetic selection and clone uniformity to environmental control, light intensity, and room planning.
That need for control starts early. Cannara’s Farnham facility plays a critical role in nursery production, mother plant management, cloning, and pheno hunting. The team is focused on producing uniform, healthy plants that can support predictable results in the cultivation cycle. As Cannara’s cultivation team explained, consistency begins at the clone stage. If plants enter production unevenly, those differences can follow the crop through irrigation, canopy development, flowering, and harvest.
Before the Fluence retrofit, Cannara’s HPS rooms created familiar operational tradeoffs. The cultivation team had to manage radiant heat, HVAC load, power limitations, and uneven light distribution. Those factors could affect temperature stability, humidity control, and the team’s ability to push higher light levels without adding additional environmental pressure. With HPS, turning lights up could also mean managing more heat. Turning lights down could mean sacrificing intensity, creating constraints the team would have to navigate with every cycle.
As Cannara continued expanding its production platform, the company needed a lighting solution that could help reduce constraints rather than create new ones. The goal was not only to replace HPS fixtures. The goal was to create rooms that could support consistent and efficient production at scale.
As Cannara continues identifying new genetics and scaling proven cultivars, maintaining consistent environmental conditions across its cultivation platform becomes increasingly important. Fluence LEDs helped reduce the heat-related limitations associated with HPS lighting while providing a standardized lighting environment that supports predictable crop performance, improved environmental control and more efficient commercial production.
Cannara selected Fluence RAPTR fixtures as part of its HPS-to-LED retrofit strategy. The company retrofitted 18 rooms with 80 Fluence RAPTRs per room at Farnham, creating a more consistent and energy-efficient lighting platform across the facility. The retrofit was designed to be straightforward, using existing infrastructure where possible and helping Cannara move quickly from conversion back into production.
According to Cannara’s cultivation team, rooms could be converted in approximately two days with two people, helping minimize downtime between production cycles. Fluence supplied adapters to support the transition from the existing HPS infrastructure, while the team connected the fixtures into Cannara’s advanced proprietary control system for on/off scheduling and dimming. For an active cultivation facility, that speed mattered. The value was not just the LED technology itself, but the ability to convert rooms quickly and keep production moving.
