Adani’s 648 MW Kamuthi solar plant, near Madurai is the world’s largest plant by a single entity. The plant was built in a record eight months at an investment of Rs 4550 crore.
India has set an aggressive target of having 175 GW of installed renewable energy in the country by 2022. Of this, 100 GW is anticipated to be solar energy (currently, installed solar capacity is around 25 GW).
At the forefront of this boom in this renewable energy is Adani Green Energy Ltd, which builds, owns and operates plants powered by renewable sources. Adani has its own ambitious solar power capacity target: 10 GW of commissioned capacity by 2022. The company is also developing the world’s largest greenfield single-location solar photovoltaic manufacturing plant with a capacity of 1.2 GW.
The entire solar park is connected to a 400 kV substation of the Tamil Nadu Transmission Corp. At full capacity, this plant can provide enough electricity to power around 150,000 homes.
Deputy General Manager for Renewable Energy N Sankaranarayanan shared some impressive figures: “the Kamuthi plant comprises 2.5 million solar modules built on 380,000 foundations and covers 2500 acres.” The solar panels are cleaned daily by a self-charged robotic system, powered by its own solar panels.
India and China are at the forefront of driving a rapid global expansion through large-scale, solar power plants. The cost of building new projects is falling, according to an analysis by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. The report points to the world’s largest scale solar projects being built in these two countries.
Individual states are also playing a big part in this boom in solar energy capacity building, said Sankaranarayanan. He adds that Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are the fastest growing states in this area, though there is an increasing interest in this clean and increasingly inexpensive alternative across the country. – V Sangita Sriram
