Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The paradox of India’s unhelpful stance at COP30, which has gone into extra innings over the obstacles the “like-minded developing countries” have placed in the way of a renewed pledge to transition away from fossil fuels, lies in New Delhi’s impressive investments in renewables. That is, even the right wing Hindu nationalist government of India has ambitious plans to transition to green energy, so why not just sign on with Spain, Germany, France and the UK in making that commitment?
A case in point is the 2.45 gigawatt Pugal Solar Park in the Bikaner district of Rajasthan, to be built on 18.5 square miles of the Thar desert, and which will go online in 2028. It will be one of the largest solar parks in the entire world.
Solar panels are still relatively bulky and benefit from constant sunshine, so deserts are ideal places to install them. Most of India has a densely populated lush, green geography fed by seasonal monsoon rains, but the northwest is the site of an arid zone stretching from Rajasthan into East Punjab.
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The people who traditionally lived in arid Rajasthan, the Rajputs, included many pastoral nomads whose style of life resembled that of Turkic tribes in Central Asia. Pastoralists make use of marginal land with occasional pasture to raise livestock by taking them around to greenery, which requires mobility. It is no wonder that the Rajputs, though Hindus, became partners in the Muslim-ruled Mughal Empire established by a Turko-Mongol dynasty in the 1500s, the Mughals, who had come down from what is now Uzbekistan. Most Mughal rulers had Rajput wives or mothers.
Today’s Rajasthan is a state with a population of around 81 million, similar to Germany, and with a state gross domestic product of around $200 billion. If it were a country it would rank between Morocco and Ukraine for GDP.
The Rajasthan Renewable Energy Corporation, Limited, is investing in the Pugal solar park, which will innovate by including 5 gigawatt hours of BESS (Battery energy storage system). Such megabatteries store excess power generated by the panels during the day for release in the evening and at night, and solar + battery is becoming the industry standard in places like California, where it has forestalled summer brownouts for several years in a row now.
As in California, Rajasthan has a power deficit in the late afternoon and evening, as the sun dims and sets and as workers come home to cook meals, watch television, and use electricity for other activities. The battery energy storage system will smooth out that energy trough.
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Patrika.com reports that this solar park “is being developed under a ‘plug and play model’, where all necessary facilities such as roads, drainage systems, boundary fencing, and power infrastructure are being prepared in advance, so that investors can start work easily.”
Rajasthan already had the enormous Bhadla Solar Park, which is purely solar-based, with 10 million solar panels and a capacity of 2.245 gigawatts, and which is also among the largest in the world. The new Pugal solar park will help move the state toward energy self-sufficiency.
Photo of Bikaner, Rajasthan, India by Anmol Jain on Unsplash
India in 2025 has 249 GW of non-fossil fuel energy capacity, some 94 gigs of which is solar. In the past five months 1.2 million households have installed rooftop solar. On one day in July of this year, renewables accounted for 50% of electricity consumption.
The rate of growth in Indian greenhouse gas emissions is slowing and the country may be reaching a plateau, because of the extensive increase in green energy. Emissions from coal dropped 4% this year. Some 8.7 percent of new automobile registrations were EVs.
In 2025, India decommission 4.6 GW of old coal plants, and it has no plans to build new coal plants past 2028.
So India’s trajectory isn’t what the Paris Climate Treaty envisaged, and is slower than the world needs it to be, but the country seems to be moving in the right direction, certainly compared to Russia or (so far) Iran. Why not just toot that horn?
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