Fred Pearce writes:

A sea of solar panels is rapidly engulfing one of the world’s largest salt deserts. By 2029, nearly 60 million panels will cover 280 square miles of India’s Rann of Kutch, extending right up to the border with Pakistan. The Khavda solar park is set to be the world’s largest and most powerful supplier of electricity from the sun, with a generating capacity of 30 gigawatts — 30 times the size of a typical coal or nuclear power station and enough to power Austria.

With India’s economy now growing faster than China’s, Khavda epitomizes the country’s breakneck rush to electrify with solar power. Installed solar capacity in India has been growing by 40 percent a year. In March, it passed 150 gigawatts, and by 2030 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 industrialization predominantly with solar energy.

Cheap solar is “enabling India to develop without the long fossil-fuel detour taken by the West and China,” says Kingsmill Bond, energy strategist and director at Ember, a U.K.-based think tank that tracks the world’s transition to renewable energy. “China built on coal; India is building on sun,” he says. “And what India is doing could also be mirrored in other emerging economies.”

India’s solar revolution comes as a surprise. Just a decade ago, apart from rooftop installations and a few microgrids serving remote rural villages, solar power was virtually unknown. The government seemed hell-bent on industrializing with coal, unleashing a rising tide of carbon dioxide emissions and supercharging climate change. [Continue reading…]