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timeThe ground is impossibly flat, white salt, and mostly uninhabited—a no-man’s land where even a cellphone signal can’t reach it. The scenery seems to stretch on endlessly as you drive by salt flats in gujarat, The land was salty and swampy and was once considered unusable.
Then, without warning, the horizon changed. Rows of huge power towers stretch into the distance, and a fleet of trucks carries turbine blades It’s longer than an airplane wing, and there’s a lump solar Panels rise from the marshy ground.
This is Khavda, India The world’s largest renewable energy project is being built vitality project. The Cavda River covers an area of 726 square kilometers, approximately seven times the size of Paris. renewable energy The park is expected to combine 30 GW of solar and wind power at one site in the Western Region India.
When fully operational, the plant will produce enough electricity to supply a country the size of Chile or the Netherlands. China may be leading the global race at how quickly it can add renewable energy capacity, but no single site anywhere else in the world rivals Kafda.
Each turbine is approximately 200m high. Each blade is 78m long and transported on a specialized trailer, which is moved at dawn to avoid high temperatures and high winds making construction unsafe. The site will eventually feature nearly 60 million solar panels, many mounted on trackers that are tilted during the day to maximize sunlight. At night, wind speeds rise, and when solar power production drops, the turbines can take over.
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The moment Kafda appears, Indiapower systems are rapidly expanding to match ChinaIt has an installed capacity of approximately 1.8 terawatts, accounting for 40% of the world’s installed renewable energy capacity, and firmly controls the supply chain for solar panel and battery manufacturing.
Last year, India achieved its target of adding 50 GW of renewable energy capacity – one of the largest annual additions in the world – bringing its total non-fossil fuel installed capacity to about 262 GW. This currently accounts for more than half of its total installed capacity (approximately 510 GW).
But there are still many problems. Can renewable energy be built at scale to provide reliable power to a rapidly growing country? economy Still heavily dependent on coal? Can India’s patchy transmission network be upgraded fast enough to actually deliver all this renewable energy to homes and industry? What happens if India needs to do it all on its own without relying on imports? China?
Much of the Khavda project is being developed by Adani Green Energy and represents a huge outlay for the wider sector adani groupThe company is also India’s largest coal importer and operates some of the more controversial coal mining operations around the world.
This isn’t a pivot away from polluting coal and towards renewable energy – Adani’s coal empire isn’t shutting down anytime soon. Instead, plans to add 50 GW of renewable energy generation by the end of this decade are seen as a smart business decision to diversify India’s energy supply.
Ashish Khanna, CEO of Adani Green Energy said independent The company works to meet the soaring energy needs of the world’s fastest-growing major economies, which must come from multiple sources.
“In terms of electricity consumption per capita, India is still a quarter of the world average,” he said. “If GDP grows by 6% to 7%, electricity demand will grow close to 9%. The country needs large-scale energy and renewable electricity will play a very critical role in meeting this demand.”
Khanna said India cannot yet meet its energy needs with renewables alone, arguing that as demand continues to grow, renewables must run in parallel with coal.
“We need baseload (from sources like traditional coal-fired power plants), we need renewables, they have to coexist,” he explained. “The question is not one versus the other, but where the proportion comes from and what the cost is.”
The situation Khanna describes is playing out in India’s power industry. Charith Konda, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), said that while coal still dominates power generation (the energy actually used), new capacity construction is overwhelmingly in the form of renewable energy.
“What you’re seeing in Kafda is not that different from what’s happening across the country,” he said. “Almost 70% to 80% of the new installed capacity every quarter over the last three to four years has come from solar and wind. They’re focused on the economy. They’re focused on policy changes.”
Conda said the constraint was not how quickly renewables could be built but how, once built, the electricity would be delivered through a grid “built around coal-fired power plants” that must now accommodate naturally varying electricity.
At Kavda, this limitation is being addressed through engineering choices, starting with combining solar and wind energy at a single site.
Preparing the project site requires rebuilding the landscape from scratch. The soil was highly saline and unstable, making it impossible to use a traditional foundation. Each turbine sits on a deep stone column base dug 20-30 feet deep and reinforced with concrete. Soil composition changes every few meters, meaning each wind turbine location must be studied individually.
“This is not a turbine that can be pulled off a European platform and installed in India. We have to think from an Indian perspective,” explains Milind Kulkarni, CEO of Adani Wind Energy.
Another major limitation is the extreme heat. Summer temperatures in Khavda can reach 50 degrees Celsius. Under such conditions, many turbines designed for temperate climates lose efficiency or must be shut down.
“Our turbines are designed to operate at temperatures of 50°C without derating,” Kulkarni said. “This is one of the only turbines of its kind that can do this.”
Then, there’s the issue of water. Khavda’s groundwater is saltier than seawater, with total dissolved solids approaching 30,000 milligrams per liter. Desalination plants now provide drinking water to workers and cooling water for operations. Before generating electricity can begin, roads, drainage systems, mobile connections and housing must be built.
Solar panels exposed to salty air require specialized coatings and frequent cleaning, which is accomplished by a waterless robotic system to avoid wasting desalinated water.
Actual construction on site will begin in April 2023. Over the course of approximately nine months, solar energy has flowed to the grid. Wind power follows closely behind, with 7 GW now in operation. The goal is to add four to five gigawatts per year.
The site’s design reflects an attempt to address one of renewable energy’s biggest weaknesses: intermittency. Solar and wind energy are combined because their modes of generating electricity complement each other. Solar output peaks during the day and winds increase at night. Together they make supply smoother, although they do not eliminate the gap.
The remaining gap is where storage becomes critical.
Adani recently announced plans to build India’s largest battery energy storage system at Khavda, a facility with a capacity of 1,126 MW and a storage capacity of 3,530 MWh. The system, expected to be operational by March 2026, is designed to store excess electricity and release it during periods of low generation, helping to stabilize the grid and reduce reliance on fossil fuel backups.
“Energy storage is the cornerstone of a renewable energy future,” Gautam Adanithe billionaire head of Adani Group said in a statement announcing the project.
The company plans to expand battery storage capacity to 50 gigawatt hours within five years.
CarbonBridge chief analyst Chris Wright said Adani Group’s international reputation continued to be affected by concerns about its coal business. In Australia, where the business is still expanding, serious questions are being raised about its value to Australians given controversies over mine safety, reduced royalties and a lack of corporate tax revenue.
But he noted that the group’s most recent financial report showed its investments in renewable energy were paying off, “supporting the company’s flagging coal trading business”.
“Adani has positioned himself and his company as one of the true global industrial tycoons of the 21st century, and their rollout of solar energy has been nothing short of incredible,” he said.
If we are looking for milestones in the global transition away from fossil fuels, then 2025 marks a turning point. Coal-fired power generation India and China both fell for the first time For more than fifty years, new solar and wind power generation has been growing fast enough to meet growing electricity demand.
This is happening even though climate action has slowed in much of the West under Donald Trump’s America retracting its clean energy commitments European governments are increasingly prioritizing energy security over emissions reductions.
Perhaps hopefully, in India at least, the transformation will be driven more by hard economic realities than by international pressure or top-down commitments like the Paris Agreement (which have proven vulnerable to changes in the political landscape).
Standing amid the sea of new turbines and solar panels, one thing is clear: The race for clean energy is not over. It has just shifted to tougher terrain, tougher trade-offs, and where growth rather than climate ambition sets the pace.