Khavda’s solar – India’s Khavda solar park is being built into what is expected to become the world’s largest solar electricity generator—30 gigawatts planned by 2029 across 280 square miles. But the rush to power industrial growth with sun is running into stubborn realities:
A sea of solar panels is spreading across one of the world’s largest salt deserts. and in India’s desert light the ambition is plain: by 2029. nearly 60 million panels are planned to cover 280 square miles of the Rann of Kutch. extending right up to the border with Pakistan. The Khavda solar park is set to become the world’s largest and most powerful supplier of electricity from the sun. with a generating capacity of 30 gigawatts—30 times the size of a typical coal or nuclear power station. enough to power Austria.
For India, the project is more than a landmark in renewables. It’s a glimpse of a different industrial pathway. Installed solar capacity in India has been growing by 40 percent a year. In March, it passed 150 gigawatts, and by 2030 it is set to double again.
Analysts say the country—home to the world’s largest population—is on the verge of becoming the first major country to power its industrialization predominantly with solar energy. “Cheap solar is ‘enabling 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 U.K.-based think tank that tracks the world’s transition to renewable energy. “China built on coal; India is building on sun,” he said. “And what India is doing could also be mirrored in other emerging economies.”.
The speed is striking because the turnaround came fast. Just a decade ago. apart from rooftop installations and a few microgrids serving remote rural villages. solar power was virtually unknown. The government had appeared focused on industrializing with coal. a direction that unleashed a rising tide of carbon dioxide emissions and supercharged climate change.
But in 2015, shortly after taking office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to double coal output by 2020. And at successive international climate negotiations. his ministers pushed back against demands that India renounce the fossil fuels that drove industrialization in Europe and North America. “How can anyone expect that developing countries make promises about phasing out coal [when they] still have to deal with poverty reduction?” Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav asked angrily at COP26 in Glasgow five years ago. before sabotaging the conference’s planned declaration on eliminating coal from the global economy.
Back home, policy changed anyway. India’s sunny climate made it a natural home for solar energy. and the cost of solar panels was falling fast. Ever since the Glasgow conference, India has been introducing solar energy at an accelerating rate. Last year, for the first time, more than half its installed generating capacity was from non-fossil fuel sources.
Yet the story of electrifying industry with solar is not just about panels. It’s about whether solar can actually deliver power—at the right time, to the right places—fast enough to replace coal.
Khavda itself shows how hard planners are trying to solve the practical problems. The park had an installed capacity of 9.4 gigawatts as of April. Its panels are attended by robots that dry-clean them at night to remove desert salt and dust without requiring precious freshwater. The project also includes wind turbines in the windy coastal region on the shores of the Arabian Sea. designed to secure nighttime power for the grid.
Still, India is not yet free of fossil fuels. Coal still delivers most of the country’s baseload and fuels about 70 percent of total power generation. It helps make India the world’s third-largest carbon dioxide emitter. after China and the U.S. and is a major cause of the country’s urban smogs. which are the worst in the world. The target to double coal mining output has been quietly forgotten. and construction of coal-fired power stations has been much reduced. Coal’s share in the energy mix is set to fall below 50 percent by 2035, according to the IEA.
Even so, coal remains deeply entrenched—while solar’s contribution is constrained by the system around it. While solar last year made up 28 percent of the country’s total installed electricity-generating capacity, it accounted for only 9.4 percent of the electricity put into supply.
Why the gap is the difference between having generating capacity and delivering electricity. There are two reasons.
The first is that India’s outdated grid cannot yet transmit all the solar power captured in the deserts of western India to where it is needed in urban heartlands. At times last year, almost 40 percent of the country’s solar power output did not reach customers. “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. ” said Charith Konda. an India-based energy researcher for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
To bridge that mismatch, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has committed to spending more than $100 billion on expanding the national grid by 29 percent by 2032, through a series of green energy corridors linking solar hubs to major industrial and population centers.
But a revamped grid is only part of the answer. said Debajit Palit. who researches the country’s energy transition at the Chintan Research Foundation in New Delhi. Solar also underdelivers because India lacks the infrastructure to store renewable energy to meet demand after the sun goes down and during the cloudier monsoon season.
One solution being hurriedly adopted is pumped storage—using water as a battery. The method links two storage tanks or reservoirs, one higher than the other. When the grid has surplus power, electricity pumps water from the bottom tank to the top tank. When power is needed, water is released through turbines to generate electricity. Starting later this year. a 1.4-gigawatt project is expected to pump water from one of India’s largest hydroelectric reservoirs. the Gandhi Sagar on the Chambal River in the state of Madhya Pradesh. Another, with a capacity of 3 gigawatts, is set for completion near Mumbai in 2030. In January, the country’s Central Electricity Authority identified 120 potential pumped-storage sites with a combined capacity of 180 gigawatts.
The second storage solution is lithium-ion batteries. World battery prices have been falling dramatically—down 58 percent since 2023. said Ember’s global electricity analyst Kostantsa Rangelova. “making round-the-clock solar electricity increasingly viable.” Recognizing this. the Indian government has since last year required new solar farms to install battery storage so they can supply more constant power to the grid. Adani is currently assembling the country’s biggest battery storage system at the Khavda complex—enough to discharge over a gigawatt of power to the grid for three hours every evening.
Even with storage and a stronger grid, India’s transition faces another kind of constraint: where the technology comes from. India remains heavily dependent on China for the technology behind its solar push. While India now manufactures most of its solar panels. the silicon materials that make the photovoltaic cells largely come from China. as do three-quarters of the lithium-ion batteries essential for energy storage.
To address that supply-chain reliance, the Indian government is working to boost domestic manufacturing of renewables technologies. But a more stubborn constraint may be land. Solar panels require a lot of space in a densely populated country that has more people than China on little more than a third of the land area.
In some areas, solar companies are offering farmers the option to continue cultivating below raised solar panels, so-called agrivoltaics. Elsewhere, solar facilities have been evicting peasant farmers, prompting angry protests. And where people aren’t in the way—like the desert salt flats of Khavda—there’s still a cost. Khavda abuts the Rann of Kutch Wildlife Sanctuary in Pakistan. home to threatened 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.
This is the tightrope India is walking: replace coal fast enough to avoid locking in decades of emissions, while building the grid, storage, supply chains, and land-use solutions to make solar reliable.
Supporters argue that mass deployment of batteries could eventually let India meet 90 percent of its electricity demand from solar energy. “The question is no longer whether solar can power India’s electricity system,” Rangelova said. “but how quickly it can scale.”
The transition isn’t uniform across the economy either. Some industries can’t simply swap energy sources. One logjam is the steel industry. which requires coal to produce the intense heat needed for blast furnaces and to convert iron ore into pig iron and then steel. India has the most ambitious plans of any country in the world for increasing steel manufacturing. aiming to double production in the coming decade. “Steel is the elephant in the room for India’s decarbonization,” Palit said.
But in other sectors, the shift is already reshaping daily life. India is electrifying its transportation system. The 42,000 miles of broad-gauge track in India’s vast railway network have been almost entirely electrified in the past decade. Electric road vehicles are moving into smoggy city streets. and India’s ubiquitous motorised rickshaws—often called tuk-tuks—are being electrified. Some 60 percent of sales of motorized rickshaws are now electric, making India the world leader. The choking of oil and gas supplies from the Middle East in recent months is expected to accelerate the shift to electrify transportation. Konda said.
Still, the political and financial shadows around major projects like Khavda also follow the solar surge. The country’s largest private power producer and the world’s second largest solar developer. the Adani Group. leads much of the solar expansion. Founded in 1988 initially as a commodity importer by Gautam Adani. a long-time confidante of Prime Minister Modi and reputedly now Asia’s richest person. the company is widely regarded as having benefited from Modi’s patronage.
Eyebrows were raised in 2023 when long-standing military protocols banning all construction within 6 miles of the border with Pakistan were set aside weeks before Adani gained control of that land for the Khavda project. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Adani executives of paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Indian government officials to obtain lucrative supply contracts for its solar energy and hiding this from potential investors. The case was dropped this month after Adani made offers to invest in the U.S., though U.S. officials denied any link.
Whatever the controversies, the basic physics of the grid remains. India’s electricity demand is growing by more than 6 percent each year, and the solar trend is set to continue. The International Energy Agency says about half the growth anticipated between now and 2030 will be met by solar power. and another 25 percent from other low-carbon sources—mostly wind. hydroelectric. and nuclear.
Optimists describe an emerging break from the familiar development pattern: China’s coal-fired expansion. week after week. versus India’s rapid solar buildout. Coal use is only 40 percent of that in China at a similar stage of economic development, Bond said. Instead, India is installing solar generating capacity at almost the same rate as China once built coal plants.
India’s leaders aim to complete the country’s transition into a modern industrial economy by 2047. the centenary of its independence from Britain. That matters for the world because India’s current per capita use of electricity is only a third of the global average. a fifth of that of China. and less than a tenth that of the U.S. Closing that gap by burning coal would be ruinous for the world’s climate. Achieving it with solar power could go a long way toward saving the planet.
But in the meantime, the desert lights are still negotiating with concrete constraints. The panels are multiplying. The grid is struggling to keep up. Storage is catching on. And coal—massive. entrenched. and still powering most of the country’s baseload—remains in the equation even as Khavda’s scale signals what India is trying to outgrow.
India solar Khavda solar park Rann of Kutch renewable energy grid pumped storage lithium-ion batteries coal power energy transition Adani Group wildlife sanctuary