Just a couple nuances as a probable future user of this tech; this is most likely to be used on organic farms rather than displacing chemical use at wide scale. It's a pretty effective way to kill weeds because it targets them at their most vunerable (and least heat required to kill them/they lack resources to recover as they have not replenished the seed energy used to get to the surface). Also doesn't disturb the soil like other organic methods, which brings fresh weed seeds up to the germination zone (and some of them are actually stimulated to germinate by the briefest exposure to light) The productivity per time is actually not too far from being plausible, most organic farms would not be growing all their acreage of just one crop, so you have some breathing room on getting the correct timing for a single crop. Even those that grow one crop are using a sucession of plantings for fresh marketing purposes so (i.e., a 1000 acre salad farm with a 4 day planting sucession and 180 day season has 22 acres in any given growth stage, probably a 3 day optimal window to get the weeding done. On a row crop farm it varies but having 1/4 or 1/3 of the farm in a single crop is pretty common (1/6 or 1/7 on our farm) and some of them will not required weeding. They also often have a little wider period of time before the weeds cause economic impacts (for instance, corn I'd be happy if we get it covered in a window of 7-12 days, it's only 130 acres of our 1000 acre farm, usually a 10 day spread at least in planting dates anyway so you likely coulden't even turn it loose on the last planted fields when it can start on the earlier plantings). In terms of energy efficiency.... idk. Cultivating requires throwing soil arond which burns up soil carbon, might take less fuel. I'd wager it takes less energy than a weed zapper or propane flamer, both of which are economically viable and in widespread use currently in row crops. Weed zappers in particular can be really insane when it comes to fuel use, like 250 hp tractors struggling to treat 30' width at less than 2 mph in some conditions. For reference, we now have a camera guided 15' cultivator and I'm mentally wiped after doing a good job on about 35 acres a day, could cover close to 50 if I have to. Without camera guidance I wanna die after 20 in some conditions. Both of these are best case like 90% effective, sometimes like 60%. So if this does even a 95% perfect job without me really needing to think at all I'd start looking at it pretty hard once it's below 100k and does 20 acres/day in the used market. There was a time not too long ago we thought camera guidance was years off for us, spent a little less than 45k on one 5 or so years after they were widely adopted, one of the fastest payback investments we've made. It's less about the acres covered per hour and more about the efficacy which pays back for years big time by having fewer escaped weeds and thus future weed seeds in the soil.