Brighter lights do not necessarily make for a better time with live plants in a tank. Light is like the gas pedal in a car, push it just right and you have a nice ride, push it too hard and you might fly off the road and die.
The dividing line is roughly 2 watts/gallon, which is at the 16 watt point for you. If you were to light above about 16 watts, you would be driving the growth of your plants so hard that they would need special CO2 apparatus and careful dosing of fertilizers into the water each day so that they wouldn't run out of nutrients and die.
At a lower level, perhaps about 11 watts, you should be able to grow plants in a different way, called "low-light" technique. You would need to find what we call "easy" or "low-light" plants. Anubias, Java Ferns, Java Moss, many Crypts and others fall into this category. Dosed nutrients (liquid carbon, fertilizers) might still be needed at a very low level but more likely the fish will provide enough fertilizer for the low-light plants. Do you know whether the water in your area tends to be hard (leaves calcium deposits) or soft?
~~waterdrop~~
