I just watched the Nebula video on Orbital Farms, and there was a fair bit of discussion about the logistics of ensuring solar lighting even in outlying stations like farms orbiting the gas giants - it strikes me that at some point, it wouldn't be unreasonable to rely on artificial lighting, but that concept wasn't really raised.

It seems like by the time we're up to building substantial stations around any of the gas giants, we'll long since have mastered fusion power, at which point the power needed to run farms on artificial lighting might be fairly trivial - particularly for a station in the same planetary system as a gigantic ball of mostly hydrogen.

Long term, the larger and more complex geometric designs needed to focus solar lighting enough to make crop growth viable that far out would probably be more useful, but effective fusion power generation seems likely to be something we develop by the end of the 21st century (possibly even by 2050, but fusion forecasts have a tendency to be overly optimistic and I'm trying to account for that), whereas it seems like orbital megastructures of arbitrary size are gonna be at some point further down the line.

Point being, it seems likely, at least to me, there would be a point where we might be considering building an orbital farm where size is a bigger constraint than energy requirement.

Or is there something I'm missing? I do know that growing plants using artificial lighting does tend to work better with some light sources than others - we had an indoor cactus growing up that needed a sun lamp with a specific kind of light bulb - but maybe this doesn't really scale up well? I've not looked into the details of growing crops with artificial sunlight.