The Adani Group which is engaged in several renewable energy endeavours throughout South Asia, including Sri Lanka stated in media release that Adani Green’s Khavda power plant is the world’s largest and it is five times the size of Paris.
The plant is near 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 and 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 pin code.
The land hardly had any vegetation due to its highly saline soil, leave alone any habitation. But Adani and his executives saw the potential that the area had. An 18-km drive from the airstrip through dusty arid land is the site for his group’s Khavda renewable energy park spread over 538 square kilometers (roughly five times the size of Paris). Adani group has not only laid solar panels that will convert sun rays into electricity and wind mills to harness wind blowing at the speed of 8 metres per second, but also built colonies for workers, put up desalination plants to make saline water pumped out of 700 meters below ground potable and utilities such as mobile phone repair shops.
The area also has its own set of challenges, heavy dust storms from March to June, no communication and transport infrastructure.
Executives said while some workers are from Khavda village, accommodations are being built to house 8,000 workers.
Khavda at its peak will generate 81 billion units that can power entire nations such as Belgium, Chile and Switzerland.
Construction started in 2022.
The comprehensive infrastructure development effort included the construction of 100 km of roads, 50 km of drainage, setting up of desalination and three reverse osmosis (RO) plants with a total capacity of 70 cubic metres per hour to meet the drinking water requirements of the project staff, laying optical fibre cables for 180 km for connectivity, and concrete batching plants.
