“Bhadla is almost unliveable,” says Keshav Prasad, the chief executive Saurya Urja, a renewable energy company.

He is talking about part of the Thar desert located in Rajasthan in the northwest of India.

Temperatures there can top 50C and frequent sandstorms add to the inhospitable conditions.

But what makes Bhadla an unforgiving place to live also makes it an ideal place to generate solar power.

Thanks to the abundant sunshine, Bhadla is home to the world’s biggest solar power farm, in part built and operated by Mr Prasad’s Saurya Urja.

Soaking up the sunshine are 10 million solar panels with the capacity to generate 2,245MW, enough to power 4.5 million households.

While keeping the solar panels clean in such a sandy and dusty environment is a challenge, Mr Prasad says running such a vast solar plant is still much simpler than operating almost any other kind of power station.

“There is not much equipment involved. Solar panels, cables, inverters and transformers are almost all that are needed to run a plant,” he says.