Inside the world's largest renewable energy centre

Stuti Mishra reports from a site in India that is combining solar and wind power to produce energy around the clock, boosting the country's standing in the clean energy race

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The ground is impossibly flat, white with salt, and largely uninhabited - a no man's land where not even a 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.

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.