Construction is underway on what will become the world’s largest renewable energy facility — a sprawling solar and wind park being built across the salt desert of western India. The Khavda Renewable Energy Park, developed by Adani Green Energy Limited (AGEL) in the state of Gujarat, will cover more than 200 square miles and cost roughly $20 billion to complete. When finished in approximately five years, it is expected to generate enough clean electricity to power 16 million Indian homes.
At a glance
- Khavda Renewable Energy Park: Located just 12 miles from the India-Pakistan border, the Gujarat facility will be the world’s largest power plant by area regardless of energy source — roughly five times the size of Paris.
- Renewable energy capacity: AGEL aims to generate nearly 30 gigawatts from Khavda alone, contributing to India’s national target of 500 gigawatts of non-fossil fuel electricity capacity by 2030.
- Clean energy investment: The Adani Group has announced plans to invest $100 billion in energy transition over the next decade, with 70% earmarked specifically for clean energy projects.
Why India needs energy at this scale
India is the world’s third-largest energy-consuming country, and its needs are growing fast. The International Energy Agency projects that India will see the largest energy demand growth of any country in the world over the next 30 years.
Rising incomes, rapid urbanization, and climate-driven heatwaves are all pushing electricity demand upward. Air conditioning ownership alone is expected to surge sharply — by 2050 C.E., India’s residential cooling demand could exceed the total energy consumption of the entire African continent today.
Coal currently accounts for roughly 70% of India’s electricity generation. With a population of 1.4 billion people and an economy growing at more than 6% annually, the country faces an immense challenge: meet exploding energy demand while shifting away from fossil fuels. Sagar Adani, executive director of AGEL, framed the stakes plainly. “If India does what China did, if India does what Europe did, if India does what the U.S. did, then we are all in for a very, very bleak climatic future,” he told CNN.
The land and the logic
The site itself was chosen partly because it offers something rare: scale without displacement. The Khavda region is barren salt desert — no significant wildlife habitat, no vegetation, no existing settlements. That makes it possible to build at an otherwise unthinkable size without the land-use conflicts that often slow major infrastructure projects.
India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has set an ambitious national target: renewable sources fulfilling 50% of India’s energy needs by 2030. Prime Minister Narendra Modi also pledged in 2021 C.E. that India would reach net zero emissions by 2070 C.E. The Khavda park is central to AGEL’s goal of supplying at least 9% of the country’s 500-gigawatt non-fossil target on its own.
A milestone shadowed by complexity
The scale of this clean energy push is genuinely historic. But the full picture is more complicated. The Adani Group remains one of India’s largest coal importers and mine operators, and continues to develop fossil fuel infrastructure domestically and abroad — including the controversial Carmichael coal mine in Australia, which has drawn fierce opposition from climate campaigners concerned about its effects on the Great Barrier Reef.
Tim Buckley, director of the Sydney-based think tank Climate Energy Finance, has criticized the conglomerate’s parallel investments in coal, arguing that Adani “continues to walk both sides of the street.” He and other analysts say the group would better serve India’s future by directing all resources toward zero-emissions technologies.
Sagar Adani has acknowledged the tension directly. More than 600 million Indians are expected to enter middle or upper income brackets over the next decade and a half. “They cannot be deprived of basic needs of energy,” he said. A full immediate transition to renewables is not yet practically achievable at that scale, he argued — though he framed Khavda as proof that India is moving as fast as it possibly can in the right direction.
The honest assessment is that this project is both a genuine breakthrough and a partial one. Coal is not disappearing from India’s grid overnight. But the Khavda Renewable Energy Park represents something meaningful: a bet, backed by billions of dollars and built on actual desert land, that clean energy can grow fast enough to matter.
India’s per-person emissions remain well below the global average, even as its economy expands rapidly. That context matters when evaluating both the ambition of projects like Khavda and the pressure that countries like India face to leapfrog the fossil-fuel-heavy development paths that wealthier nations took. As the International Renewable Energy Agency has noted, India’s renewable buildout has accelerated faster than almost any other major economy in recent years.
Whether Khavda becomes a model for what developing nations can achieve — or a footnote in a larger story of too little, too late — may depend on decisions still being made.
Read more
For more on this story, see: CNN
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights and COP30: 160 million hectares recognized
- Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
- The Good News for Humankind archive on India
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