Today, the facility seems almost quaint.īy 2015, India was planning solar farms that were hundreds of times bigger. News stories at the time touted its benefits for local farmers, who could use the electricity to operate water pumps and irrigate their fields. Built with American solar cells on about fifteen acres of land secured by the government, the panels produced just three megawatts, or a fraction of one per cent of the country’s initial goal. Six months later, in a village several hours southeast of Pavagada, the state of Karnataka opened what was then the nation’s largest solar installation. In 2010, India launched its National Solar Mission, a sun-powered moon shot with a staggering goal: twenty thousand megawatts of installed capacity by 2022. They are not ready to spare it.” A fan blew warm air at us as he asked the thirteen-thousand-acre question: “How do you solve that problem?” “Whenever you establish an industry, the main problem is about the land,” Amaranath told me. Many more ultra-mega solar parks are in the works-and, as photovoltaic panels become even cheaper and more efficient, the primary obstacle to growth may no longer be technological. Many of the worst impacts of the crisis will be felt in South Asia, but the subcontinent is sunny enough that, in theory, it could eventually supply clean electricity to a large portion of humanity. The success or failure of solar here will go a long way toward determining the speed of the world’s clean-energy transition, and thus the severity of our collective climate emergency. India is a country of 1.4 billion people that continues to generate most of its electricity from coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. “Without the parks, that is not possible.” “That is a very ambitious project,” he went on. India has pledged to meet half of its energy needs with renewables by 2030, and to achieve net-zero emissions by 2070. “The government of India has a vision,” he said. The Pavagada model is now being replicated around the country, Amaranath told me. He had long, dark eyelashes a salt-and-pepper beard and three parallel streaks of white across his forehead, the tilak of a practicing Hindu. and general manager of Karnataka Solar Power Development Corporation Limited (K.S.P.D.C.L.), which operates Pavagada Solar Park. In an office in the metropolis of Bengaluru, four hours south of the solar farm, I met N. Near the school, I saw a single street light and was told that it was funded not by Pavagada Solar Park but by the panchayat, the local village council. “Twenty-two per cent of the electricity in Karnataka is generated here, but for us there is no power,” a local school administrator told me. They are not powered by Pavagada, at least not directly. And nestled like islands within the silicon sea are five small villages, virtually untouched. Some are fenced in with colorful old saris that waft in the wind. In a few places, however, its high-tech panels are interrupted by plots of cropland. Pavagada, with a capacity exceeding two thousand megawatts, is in the running for third. The world’s biggest solar installation, Bhadla Solar Park, is in the North Indian state of Rajasthan the second largest is in China. Pavagada generates almost four times the power of the largest functioning solar farm in the U.S. Around 1 P.M., the park’s electricity output peaked at more than two thousand megawatts-enough for millions of homes. The wind gusted and overhead power lines hummed. As the temperature soared into the mid-nineties, the air seemed to shimmer with heat a single ghostly raptor hovered over the area, looking for prey in whatever patches of grass remained. But, within twenty minutes of sunrise on a morning in late February, the park was producing 158.32 megawatts, enough to power, on average, more than a hundred thousand Indian homes. In the predawn hours, the solar park consumes a small amount of electricity for lights and computers, so the monitor may show a negative number. The panels cover thirteen thousand acres, or about twenty square miles-only slightly smaller than the area of Manhattan.Īs the planet turns and the sun climbs, electricity streams from the panels to eight nearby substations, and, in one of them, a computer monitor decorated with a red hibiscus flower registers their collective power in megawatts. Here, within millions of photovoltaic panels, lined up in rows and columns like an army at attention, electrons vibrate with energy. Eventually, the sunlight reaches a sea of glass and silicon known as Pavagada Ultra Mega Solar Park. Its rays fall across the grasslands that surround them and the occasional sleepy village the sky changes color from sherbet-orange to powdery blue. Every morning in the Tumakuru District of Karnataka, a state in southern India, the sun tips over the horizon and lights up the green-and-brown hills of the Eastern Ghats.
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