Somebody walk me through the math because this article is garbage when it comes to any real information.

For example, what's the energy budget?

We can do simple calculations for how much sugar you need to convert in order to get a watt worth of power. From there, we need to know what the lumens per watt number is for the plant. And that's useful lumens with a useful spectra actually being delivered where you want them -- just like any other luminaire design.

For example, sugar has about 4 calories per gram so 100% efficiency burning 1 gram per second equals 17 watts. Do that for 8 hours, and you'll need 28.8 kilograms of sugar.

I did a little research. Sugar beets, those amazingly efficient plants that have been selectively breed to produce excess sugar. Under optimum conditions (i.e. the right fertilizers, irrigation, pest control, proper spacing, proper planting and harvesting,...) they'll produce between 16 to 22 tons per acre over a five month period. So that's 0.12 tons per acre per day (109 kilos per acre per day).

We need a little over 1/4 that amount of sugar to produce a measly 17 watts of power at 100% efficiency.

If that math is anywhere near correct, how the freaking hell is this supposed to work?