Plants must balance the energy capture with the energy utilization in CO2 fixation to prevent photodamage. Among photo-protective responses, the fastest is releasing the excess absorbed energy as heat, which is observable as nonphotochemical quenching of chlorophyll fluorescence (NPQ). Under unfavorable environmental conditions, plants face additional challenges in maintaining energy balance due to substantial limitations in processing the light energy via photochemical quenching. Therefore, NPQ is well known as an important phenomenon for plant survival and environmental fitness. We are interested in improving water use efficiency and engineering tolerance to poor soil fertility and low temperature in crops. We have combined plant physiology, biochemistry, semi-high-throughput phenotyping, metabolomics and genome-wide association study to establish the groundwork for developing synthetic approaches to increasing sustainable food, fiber and bioenergy production. We identified the genetic control of NPQ under control and low soil fertility conditions. We discovered dark accumulation of photoprotective pigment, zeaxanthin, in highly chilling tolerant warm-season C4 bioenergy grass to be linked with ascorbate regeneration. Using the latest findings of our work we start to engineer NPQ kinetics for designing plants more protected from environmental perturbations. In our recent research, we improved water use efficiency, reduced whole-plant water consumption and increased yield under drought via modulation of the redox signal for stomatal opening by environment-depended upregulation of photosystem II subunit S.