\n<\/p>\n
“Bhadla is almost unliveable,” says Keshav Prasad, the chief executive Saurya Urja, a renewable energy company.<\/b><\/p>\n
He is talking about part of the Thar desert located in Rajasthan in the northwest of India.<\/p>\n
Temperatures there can top 50C and frequent sandstorms add to the inhospitable conditions.<\/p>\n
But what makes Bhadla an unforgiving place to live also makes it an ideal place to generate solar power.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Soaking up the sunshine are 10 million solar panels with the capacity to generate 2,245MW, enough to power 4.5 million households.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“There is not much equipment involved. Solar panels, cables, inverters and transformers are almost all that are needed to run a plant,” he says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n