A vast expanse of solar panels is quickly spreading across one of the world’s largest salt deserts. By 2029, nearly 60 million panels will cover 280 square miles of the Rann of Kutch in India, reaching the Pakistan border. The Khavda solar park is poised to become the largest and most powerful solar electricity supplier globally, boasting a 30-gigawatt capacity—30 times the output of a typical coal or nuclear power plant, enough to power Austria.
With India’s economy now outpacing China’s growth, Khavda symbolizes the nation’s rapid transition to solar energy. India’s solar capacity has been expanding by 40 percent annually. In March, it surpassed 150 gigawatts, with plans to double by 2030.
Analysts predict that India, the world’s most populous country, is on the brink of becoming the first major nation to predominantly use solar energy for industrialization.
“Cheap solar is allowing India to develop without the long fossil-fuel detour taken by the West and China,” said Kingsmill Bond, an energy strategist and director at Ember, a UK-based think tank monitoring the transition to renewable energy. “China built on coal; India is building on sun. What India is doing could also be mirrored in other emerging economies.”
India’s solar transformation is unexpected. A decade ago, solar power was virtually nonexistent outside of rooftop installations and a few microgrids in remote villages. The government appeared focused on coal-driven industrialization, contributing to rising carbon dioxide emissions and worsening climate change.
In 2015, shortly after taking office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed to double coal production by 2020. At international climate talks, his ministers resisted calls to abandon the fossil fuels that fueled industrialization in Europe and North America.
“How can anyone expect developing countries to promise phasing out coal when they still have to address poverty reduction?” Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav asked at COP26 in Glasgow five years ago, before disrupting the conference’s planned declaration on eliminating coal globally.
However, domestic policy was already shifting. India’s sunny climate made solar energy a natural fit, and solar panel costs were rapidly decreasing. Since the Glasgow conference, India has accelerated its solar adoption. Last year, for the first time, more than half of its installed generating capacity came from non-fossil fuel sources.
As India’s electricity demand grows over 6 percent annually, the solar trend is expected to continue. The International Energy Agency (IEA) anticipates that solar power will account for about half of the growth between now and 2030, with another 25 percent from other low-carbon sources like wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear power.
The Adani Group, the country’s largest private power producer and the world’s second-largest solar developer, is at the forefront of this solar surge. Established in 1988 as a commodity importer by Gautam Adani, a long-time associate of Prime Minister Modi and reportedly Asia’s wealthiest person, Adani is thought to have benefited from Modi’s support.
Eyebrows were raised in 2023 when long-standing military protocols prohibiting construction within 6 miles of the border with Pakistan were lifted weeks before Adani gained control of the land for the Khavda project. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Adani executives of bribing Indian officials to secure lucrative solar energy contracts and concealing this from investors. The case was dismissed this month after Adani proposed investments in the U.S., though U.S. officials denied any connection.
The Khavda solar park, which had a capacity of 9.4 gigawatts as of April, remains a significant achievement for Adani. Its panels are serviced by robots that clean them at night, removing salt and dust without using valuable freshwater. The project also features wind turbines in the breezy coastal area along the Arabian Sea, providing nighttime power for the grid.
India still faces challenges in reducing its dependence on fossil fuels. Coal supplies most of the country’s baseload power and accounts for about 70 percent of total power generation. It is a significant contributor to India’s status as the world’s third-largest carbon dioxide emitter, after China and the U.S., and a major cause of urban smog. However, the goal to double coal mining output has been quietly abandoned, and the construction of coal-fired power plants has slowed. According to the IEA, coal’s share in the energy mix is expected to drop below 50 percent by 2035.
Despite its large generating capacity, coal remains deeply entrenched. Other challenges limit solar power’s contribution to India’s energy needs. Although solar accounted for 28 percent of the total installed electricity-generating capacity last year, it supplied only 9.4 percent of the electricity delivered to the grid.
Why the discrepancy? There are two primary reasons.
Firstly, India’s outdated grid cannot yet transmit all the solar power captured in the western deserts to urban centers. At times last year, almost 40 percent of the country’s solar power output did not reach customers.
Charith Konda, an energy researcher in India for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, attributes this to the rapid growth of solar facilities, which has outpaced grid development. “Solar plants typically take 18 to 24 months to build, while transmission projects usually take about five years… The grid is trying to catch up.” To address this, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has pledged over $100 billion to expand the national grid by 29 percent by 2032, creating green energy corridors linking solar hubs to major industrial and population centers.
However, a revamped grid is only part of the solution, said Debajit Palit, who studies India’s energy transition at the Chintan Research Foundation in New Delhi. Solar underperforms because India lacks the infrastructure to store renewable energy for use after sunset and during the cloudy monsoon season.
One hurriedly adopted solution is using water as a battery, known as pumped storage. This involves connecting two storage tanks or reservoirs, one higher than the other. When the grid has surplus power, electricity is used to pump water from the lower tank to the upper tank. When additional power is needed, the water is released through turbines back to the lower tank to generate electricity.
Later this year, a 1.4-gigawatt project is set to begin pumping water from one of India’s largest hydroelectric reservoirs, the Gandhi Sagar on the Chambal River in Madhya Pradesh. Another project, with a 3-gigawatt capacity, is slated for completion near Mumbai in 2030. In January, the Central Electricity Authority identified 120 potential pumped-storage sites capable of generating 180 gigawatts.
Another solution to the storage issue lies in lithium-ion batteries. World battery prices have fallen by 58 percent since 2023, according to Ember’s global electricity analyst Kostantsa Rangelova, “making round-the-clock solar electricity increasingly viable.”
Recognizing this, the Indian government has required new solar farms to install battery storage since last year, allowing them to supply more consistent power to the grid. Adani is currently assembling the country’s largest battery storage system at the Khavda complex, capable of discharging over a gigawatt of power to the grid for three hours every evening.
Another challenge is India’s heavy reliance on China for solar technology. While it manufactures most of its solar panels, the silicon materials for photovoltaic cells largely come from China, as do three-quarters of the lithium-ion batteries essential for energy storage.
The Indian government is working to reduce this dependency by boosting domestic manufacturing of renewables technologies. However, a more enduring challenge may be land availability.
Solar panels require significant space, a challenge in a densely populated country with more people than China on just over a third of the land area. In some areas, solar companies offer farmers the option to continue farming beneath raised solar panels, a technique known as agrivoltaics. Elsewhere, solar facilities are displacing peasant farmers, leading to protests.
Building in uninhabited areas, like the desert salt flats of Khavda, avoids human displacement but may threaten wildlife. The Khavda complex adjoins the Rann of Kutch Wildlife Sanctuary in Pakistan, home to endangered species such as striped hyenas, desert lynx, jackals, and desert foxes, as well as critically endangered great Indian bustards and migrating waterfowl following the Central Asian Flyway from Siberia to the Indian Ocean.
Despite these drawbacks, optimists believe that widespread battery use could allow India to meet 90 percent of its electricity demand with solar energy. “The question is no longer whether solar can power India’s electricity system,” said Rangelova, “but how quickly it can scale.”
Not all of India’s booming industries can easily replace coal with solar energy, however. The steel industry presents a significant challenge, as it relies on coal to produce the high heat required for blast furnaces and to convert iron ore into pig iron and steel. India has the world’s most ambitious plans to increase steel production, aiming to double production in the coming decade. “Steel is the elephant in the room for India’s decarbonization,” said Palit.
In other sectors, however, the news is more positive. India is electrifying its transportation system. The country’s vast railway network, covering 42,000 miles of broad-gauge track, is almost entirely electrified after a decade of work. Meanwhile, electric road vehicles are entering the nation’s smog-filled cities, with motorized rickshaws, known as tuk-tuks, electrifying particularly rapidly. Currently, 60 percent of motorized rickshaw sales are electric, making India a global leader.
The recent disruption of oil and gas supplies from the Middle East is expected to further accelerate India’s shift to electric transportation, said Konda.
Despite the challenges, India’s rapid solar power expansion distinguishes it from the energy paths taken by China and many other countries, which have relied on fossil fuels for economic development.
For years, China was known for building a new coal-fired power station every week. India, in contrast, is avoiding that route. Its coal consumption is only 40 percent of China’s at a similar stage of economic development, according to Bond. Instead, India is installing solar capacity at a rate comparable to China’s past coal plant construction pace.
With India’s leaders aiming to complete the country’s transformation into a modern industrial economy by 2047, the centenary of its independence from Britain, this shift holds global significance. India’s current per capita electricity use is only a third of the global average, a fifth of China’s, and less than a tenth of the U.S.’s. Achieving increased electricity use through coal would be catastrophic for the world’s climate. Doing so with solar power could significantly contribute to saving the planet.
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