A narrow airstrip that doesn’t even have an air traffic controller to guide incoming airplanes and whose only infrastructure is a portable toilet and a make-shift office in a container in the midst of miles of barren land bordering Pakistan, is an unlikely gateway to the world’s largest Renewable Energy Park (REP).
The airstrip was even smaller in December 2022, when Adani group head Gautam Adani, who was then the second richest person in the world, first used a small aircraft to reach the barren area that didn’t even have a pincode and got its name from a village 80-km away.
The land hardly had any vegetation due to its highly saline soil, leave alone any habitation. But the area with second best solar radiation in the country after Ladakh and wind speeds five times of plains, served as an idle location for a REP.
An 18-km drive from the airstrip through dusty arid land is the site for his group’s Khavda REP spread over 538 sq km – roughly five times the size of Paris.
When Mr Adani first landed at Khavda, he joked if anyone could even find a mosquito in the area, his executives said.
But since then, his group has not just laid solar panels that will convert sun rays into electricity and wind mills to harness wind blowing at the speed of 8 meters per second, but also built colonies for workers, put up desalination plants to make saline water pumped out of 700 meters below ground portable and utilities such as mobile phone repair shops.
Adani Green Energy Ltd, India’s largest Renewable Energy company, will invest about 1.5 lakh crore to generate 30 megawatts of clean electricity at Khavda in Gujarat’s Kutch, it’s Managing Director Vneet Jaain said.
“We have just now commissioned 2,000 MW (2 GW) of capacity at Khavda and plan to add 4 GW in the current fiscal (financial year ending March 2025) and 5 GW every year thereafter,” he said.
Khavda at its peak will generate 81 billion units that can power entire nations such as Belgium, Chile and Switzerland, they said. PTI
