India has officially announced that they have completed the World’s Largest Solar Power Plant in Kamuthi, Tamil Nadu. This impressive facility has a capacity of 648 MW, which is about 98 MW more than the 550 MW Topaz Solar Farm in California, which previously held this title.
The massive plant has been built on an area of 10 square km (3.9 square miles) and is certainly a testimony to the commitment of the Indian Government towards reducing their carbon footprint and alleviating the pollution crisis in the country.
The plant has been built with the collaboration of the Adani Group and their $679m investment. The solar farm was completed in an impressive time of just eight months, and it has over 2.5 million individual solar modules. If you are not impressed with this, autonomous cleaning robots are installed each solar array, which will ensure that the solar panels are cleaned at regular intervals and are working at their most efficient levels.
The plant is capable of powering about 150,000 homes in the region, and can also help the country reach their goal of running over 60 million homes solely on solar energy by 2022. The target is indeed far-fetched, but at least India is taking steps in the right direction with around 10 GW of solar power already in action.
The move towards becoming a greener country started after the country was hit by record air pollution. India is also a major user of coal and has been termed a mega-contributor towards the global coal pollution problem.
To reach the coveted target set by India, they will need to build hundreds of such solar power plants. But for now, we must applaud the initiative and a step towards a brighter tomorrow.