I was particularly thinking about applications in arid climates. Where just spraying water on plants or cooling large greenhouses has inefficiencies on its own.
Or is cooling horizontal greenhouses easy enough, even in deserts?
The Sundrop Farms approach pumps seawater through an evaporative structure to control the temperature inside a greenhouse in a desert climate. That way the salt doesn't get on the plants but you only need a little electricity to run the cooling system. In a desert far inland you need extra piping/pumping or a more expensive cooling system, but I still can't see a terrestrial scenario where artificial-illumination greenhouses provides calories at a lower environmental or financial cost than natural sunlight greenhouses or fields.
Artificial illumination farming of course does make sense for crewed deep space missions because there's not any other option. That's actually how I first started thinking about this problem -- "what if you wanted to feed a crewed nuclear powered outpost in orbit around Neptune?" It turns out that it takes a lot of electricity to feed people that way because our food crops suck at turning light-energy into human-edible energy. Having a rough idea of the enormous electricity expenditures, I started doing double-takes when vertical farm enthusiasm started spreading a few years ago.
I'm lucky enough to be able to purchase Sundrop-grown tomatoes[1] (or at least I'm pretty sure they are Sundrop) and can confirm they are both price competitive (as in they are always the cheapest option) and taste great.
Or is cooling horizontal greenhouses easy enough, even in deserts?