Plant growth is driven by lighting. The more light you have, the more the plants will try to grow. However, their growth will be limited by the amount of food (nutrients/ferts/fertilisers) they have available. Plants need a range of nutrients, see here for complete details: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=50222
As Simon said, you do not need a lot of light to have excellent growth. In fact, the only reason to have more light, is to have faster growing plants - but faster growing plants also require lots of nutrients. I like to think of my high tech (fast) tank as a teenage boy, it eats a lot, grows a lot and drives a fast car so it basically costs me a lot to maintain and it can go off the rails very quickly. :lol:
The idea with a planted tank is that you want to give just enough light to let the plants grow and not so much that you can't keep up with the feeding - if that happens, the plants will begin to starve and this can result in deficiencies, poor growth and opportunistic algae growth. I would advise getting a low tech tank going well, get some plants that do well with low lighting, start fertilising and read up. In no time you will have a satisfying result and in the future you can always go high tech if you want to.