Inside the world’s largest renewable energy park – proof the green transition isn’t dead

Stuti Mishra reports from a site in western India that’s roughly seven times larger than the city of Paris and combines solar and wind power to produce energy around the clock. Nothing on this scale exists anywhere else in the world

The ground is impossibly flat, white with salt, and largely uninhabited – a no man’s land where not even cellphone signal can reach. The landscape seems to stretch endlessly as you drive through Gujarat’s salt flats, a land so saline and marshy it was once considered unusable.

Then, without warning, the horizon transforms. Rows of hulking electricity towers stretch into the distance, convoys of trucks carry turbine blades longer than plane wings, and a crop of solar panels rises from the marshy ground.

This is Khavda, where India is building the world’s largest renewable energy project. Spanning 726 sq km – about seven times larger than the city of Paris – the Khavda Renewable Energy Park is expected to generate 30 gigawatts of power by combining solar and wind on the same site in western India.

When fully operational, the site will produce enough electricity to supply a country the size of Chile or the Netherlands. China may be leading the global race in terms of how fast it is adding renewable energy capacity, but no single site comparable to Khavda exists anywhere else in the world.

The turbines are each about 200m tall. Each blade, 78m long, is transported on specialised trailers that move at dawn, before heat and wind make construction unsafe. The site will eventually feature nearly 60 million solar panels, many mounted on trackers that tilt through the day to maximise sunlight. At night, wind speeds rise, allowing turbines to take over as solar generation drops.

A view of Khavda renewable energy park with rows of solar panels and wind turbines (Stuti Mishra/The Independent)

Khavda is coming up at a moment when India’s power system is expanding rapidly to compete with China, which, at around 1.8 terawatts, enjoys 40 per cent of the global installed capacity in renewables as well as a firm grip on supply chains for manufacturing solar panels and batteries.

Last year, India achieved the goal of adding 50 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity – one of the largest annual additions globally – taking its total non-fossil fuel capacity to about 262 gigawatts. That’s now more than half of its total installed generation capacity of about 510 gigawatts.

But many questions remain. Can renewables be built at a large enough scale to deliver reliable power to a fast-growing economy that still relies heavily on coal? Will India’s patchy transmission network be upgraded fast enough to actually get all this renewable energy to households and industries? And what happens if India needs to do all this on its own, without relying on imports from China?

Most of the Khavda project is being developed by Adani Green Energy and represents a huge outlay for the wider Adani Group, which is also India’s largest importer of coal and operates some of the more controversial coal mining operations around the world.

It’s not quite a pivot from dirty coal to renewables – Adani’s coal empire isn’t going to be shut down any time soon. Rather, the plan to add 50 gigawatts of renewable capacity by the end of this decade is seen as a sensible business decision, diversifying India’s energy supplies.

Employees at the Adani Group owned Khavda Renewable Energy Park in Khavda (AFP via Getty Images)

Ashish Khanna, CEO of Adani Green Energy, tells The Independent the company is focused on meeting the soaring energy demands of the world’s fastest-growing major economy, and that this has to come from a mix of sources.

“India is still one-fourth of the world average when it comes to per capita electricity consumption,” he says. “If GDP grows at six to seven per cent, electricity demand grows closer to nine per cent. The country needs energy at scale, and renewable electricity will play a very critical role in meeting that demand.”

Khanna says India cannot yet meet its energy needs with renewables alone, arguing that they must operate in parallel with coal as demand continues to rise.

“We need base load (from sources such as traditional coal-powered plants) and we need renewables, they have to coexist,” he explains. “The question is not one versus the other, but what proportion comes from where, and at what cost.”

Engineers work at the control centre of the Adani Green Renewable Energy Plant in Khavda, in India's Gujarat state (AFP via Getty Images)

What Khanna describes is playing out across India’s power sector. While coal still dominates electricity generation – the energy that’s actually being used – new capacity building is overwhelmingly in the form of renewables, says Charith Konda, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).

“What you are seeing at Khavda is not very different from what is happening across the country,” he says. “Almost 70 to 80 per cent of new power capacity installations every quarter over the last three to four years is coming from solar and wind. They are following economics. They are following what is happening in policy.”

The constraint, Konda says, is not the pace of renewable construction, but how electricity is delivered once it is built, through a grid “built around thermal plants” which must now accommodate power that is variable by nature.

At Khavda, that constraint is being addressed through engineering choices, beginning with combining solar and wind on a single site.

Getting the project site ready required rebuilding the landscape from scratch. The soil is so saline and unstable that conventional foundations can’t be used. Each turbine sits on a deep stone-column base, dug 20-30 feet down and reinforced with concrete. Soil composition changes every few metres, meaning every wind turbine location must be individually studied.

“This is not a turbine you can just pull from a European platform and install in India. We had to think from an India point of view,” Milind Kulkarni, CEO of Adani Wind, explains.

A solar panel is cleaned by a robot at Khavda (Stuti Mishra/The Independent)

Another major constraint was extreme heat. Summer temperatures at Khavda can rise to 50C. Many turbines designed for temperate climates lose efficiency, or must be shut down, under such conditions.

“Our turbine is designed to operate at 50C without derating,” Kulkarni says. “That is one of the only turbines in its class that can do that.”

Then, there was the water problem. Groundwater in Khavda is saltier than seawater, with total dissolved solids approaching 30,000 milligrams per litre. Now desalination plants supply drinking water for workers and cooling water for operations. Roads, drainage systems, mobile connectivity, and housing had to be constructed before power generation could begin.

Solar panels exposed to salt-laden air need specialised coating and frequent cleaning, which is done by waterless robotic systems to avoid wasting desalinated water.

Workers operating a machine during the installation of a solar panel at the Adani Group owned Khavda Renewable Energy Park in Khavda (AFP via Getty Images)

Actual construction at the site began in April 2023. In about nine months, solar power was already flowing to the grid. Wind generation followed soon after and currently seven gigawatts are already operational. The target is to add four to five gigawatts each year.

The site’s design reflects an attempt to address one of renewable energy’s biggest weaknesses: intermittency. Solar and wind are combined because their generation patterns complement each other. Solar output peaks during the day, winds strengthen at night. Together, they smoothen supply, although they do not eliminate gaps.

That remaining gap is where storage becomes critical.

Adani recently announced plans to build India’s largest battery energy storage system at Khavda, a 1,126 megawatt facility with a storage capacity of 3,530 megawatt hours. The system, expected to be commissioned by March 2026, is designed to store excess power and release it during periods of low generation, helping to stabilise the grid and reduce reliance on fossil-fuel back-up.

“Energy storage is the cornerstone of a renewable-powered future,” Gautam Adani, multibillionaire head of the Adani conglomerate, said in a statement announcing the project.

The company plans to scale battery storage capacity to 50 gigawatt hours within five years.

Wind turbines dot the coastline along a giant solar farm near Weifang in eastern China's Shandong province (AP)

Chris Wright, principal analyst at CarbonBridge, says the Adani Group’s international reputation continues to be shaped by concerns around its coal business. In Australia that business is still expanding, and serious questions are being asked about value for Australians given controversies around mine safety, reduced royalties and a lack of corporate tax revenues.

But he notes that the group’s most recent financial reporting shows its investment in renewables is paying off, “holding up the company’s weakening coal trading business”.

“Adani has positioned himself and his companies as one of the truly global industrial tycoons of the 21st century, and their rollout of solar power is simply incredible,” he says.

If we are looking for landmarks in the global transition away from fossil fuels, 2025 marked something of a turning point. Coal-fired power generation fell in both India and China for the first time in more than five decades, as new solar and wind capacity grew fast enough to meet rising electricity demand.

This is happening even as climate action in much of the West has slowed, with the US under Donald Trump rolling back its clean-energy commitments and European governments increasingly prioritising energy security over emissions cuts.

Perhaps there is hope in the fact that, in India at least, the transition is being shaped less by international pressure or top-down pledges like the Paris Agreement – which have proved vulnerable to shifting political landscapes – than by cold, hard economic realities.

Standing in the middle of a vast sea of new turbines and solar panels, one thing is clear: the clean energy race is not dead. It has just shifted to tougher terrain, harder trade-offs and places where growth, not climate ambition, is setting the pace.

This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project