India’s Solar Leap: Industrializing with Sunlight

A vast expanse of solar panels is rapidly covering one of the world’s largest salt deserts. By 2029, nearly 60 million panels will blanket 280 square miles of India’s Rann of Kutch, stretching toward the border with Pakistan. The Khavda solar park is poised to become the world’s largest and most powerful supplier of electricity from the sun. It will have a generating capacity of 30 gigawatts. This amount is 30 times the size of a typical coal or nuclear power station. It is enough energy to power an entire country like Austria.

India’s economy is growing faster than China’s. The Khavda project represents the country’s rapid rush to electrify using solar power. Installed solar capacity in India has been growing by 40 percent each year. In March 2024, it passed 150 gigawatts. By 2030, this number is set to double again. Analysts say the world’s most populous nation is on the verge of becoming the first major country to power its industrial growth mainly with solar energy.

Cheap solar energy is enabling India to develop without the long fossil-fuel path taken by the West and China. Kingsmill Bond, an energy strategist at Ember, a U.K.-based think tank, noted this shift. "China built on coal; India is building on sun," he said. He added that what India is doing could be copied by other emerging economies.

This solar revolution comes as a surprise. Just a decade ago, solar power was virtually unknown in India, except for small rooftop installations and microgrids in remote villages. The government seemed determined to industrialize with coal, which increased carbon dioxide emissions and worsened climate change. In 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to double coal output by 2020. At international climate meetings, his ministers pushed back against demands to stop using fossil fuels. Environment minister Bhupender Yadav argued that developing countries still needed to deal with poverty before they could promise to phase out coal.

However, policy was changing at home. India’s sunny climate made it ideal for solar energy, and the cost of solar panels was falling quickly. Since the Glasgow climate conference in 2021, India has introduced solar energy at an accelerating rate. Last year, for the first time, more than half of its installed generating capacity came from non-fossil fuel sources.