A sea of solar panels is rapidly engulfing one of the world’s largest salt deserts. By 2029, nearly 60 million panels will cover 280 square miles of India’s Rann of Kutch, extending right up to the border with Pakistan. The Khavda solar park is set to be 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 and enough to power Austria. Not bad for a salt flat.
With India’s economy now growing faster than China’s, Khavda epitomizes the country’s breakneck rush to electrify with solar power. Installed solar capacity in India has been growing by 40 percent a year. In March, it passed 150 gigawatts, and by 2030 is set to double again. Analysts say the world’s most populous nation is on the verge of becoming the first major country to power its industrialization predominantly with solar energy. “China built on coal; India is building on sun,” said Kingsmill Bond, energy strategist and director at Ember, a U.K.-based think tank. “And what India is doing could also be mirrored in other emerging economies.”
This solar revolution comes as a surprise because, just a decade ago, the government seemed hell-bent on industrializing with coal. In 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to double coal output by 2020, and at COP26 in Glasgow, Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav angrily sabotaged the conference’s planned declaration on eliminating coal from the global economy. But back home, policy was already changing. The country’s sunny climate made it a natural home for solar energy, and the cost of solar panels was falling fast. Last year, for the first time, more than half its installed generating capacity was from non-fossil fuel sources.
Leading the solar surge is the country’s largest private power producer and the world’s second largest solar developer, the Adani Group, founded by Gautam Adani, a long-time confidante of Prime Minister Modi and reputedly now Asia’s richest person. 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. And 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. The case was dropped this month after Adani made offers to invest in the U.S., though U.S. officials denied any link. Still, the fast-growing Khavda solar park, which had an installed capacity of 9.4 gigawatts as of April, is the jewel in the Adani crown. 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, which should secure nighttime power for the grid.
India still has a long way to go to break its dependence on 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. But 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.
There are other constraints on how much solar power can contribute to keeping the lights on in India. 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. The first reason is that the country’s outdated grid cannot yet transmit all the solar power being captured in the deserts of western India to where it is needed in the urban heartlands. At times last year, almost 40 percent of the country’s solar power output did not reach customers. Charith Konda, an India-based energy researcher for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, attributes this to the rapid growth of solar facilities, which has outstripped grid development. To that end, 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.
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 by linking two reservoirs at different elevations. 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 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.
Another solution to the storage problem is lithium-ion batteries. World battery prices are 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. 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.
An additional concern is that India remains heavily dependent on China for the technology behind its solar push. While it 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. The Indian government is working to address this reliance by boosting domestic manufacturing. A more long-lasting constraint may be land. Solar panels require a lot of space - a difficult issue in a densely populated country that has more people than China on little more than a third of the land area. In a few places, solar companies are offering farmers the option to continue cultivating below raised solar panels, so-called agrivoltaics. But elsewhere, solar facilities are evicting peasant farmers, creating angry protests. Occupying areas empty of people, such as the desert salt flats of Khavda, avoids disturbing people but may put wildlife at risk. The Khavda complex abuts the Rann of Kutch Wildlife Sanctuary in Pakistan, which is 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.
Despite such drawbacks, optimists believe that mass deployment of batteries should one day allow India to meet 90 percent of its electricity demand from 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 banish coal, however. The steel industry requires coal to produce the intense heat needed for blast furnaces, and India aims to double steel production in the coming decade. “Steel is the elephant in the room for India’s decarbonization,” said Palit. But in other sectors, the news is better. The country is electrifying its transportation system: 42,000 miles of broad-gauge railway track have been almost entirely electrified in the past decade, and some 60 percent of sales of motorized rickshaws (tuk-tuks) are now electric, making India the world leader.
Whatever the drawbacks, the rapid advance of Indian solar power marks a sharp difference from the energy path chosen by China. For years, China was notorious for building a new coal-fired power station every week. But India is avoiding that path. Its coal use is only 40 percent of that in China at a similar stage of economic development, according to Bond. Instead, it is installing solar generating capacity at almost the same rate as China once built coal plants. With India’s leaders aiming to complete the country’s transition into a modern industrial economy by 2047 - the centenary of its independence from Britain - this matters for the world. India’s current per capita use of electricity is only a quarter of China’s, so there’s a huge amount of growth to come. And now, that growth is increasingly powered by the sun.