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Power Earth

A Coal Billionaire is Building the World's Biggest Clean Energy Plant - Five Times the Size of Paris (cnn.com) 79

Posted by EditorDavid from the city-of-industry dept.
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: Five times the size of Paris. Visible from space. The world's biggest energy plant. Enough electricity to power Switzerland. The scale of the project transforming swathes of barren salt desert on the edge of western India into one of the most important sources of clean energy anywhere on the planet is so overwhelming that the man in charge can't keep up. "I don't even do the math any more," Sagar Adani told CNN in an interview last week.

Adani is executive director of Adani Green Energy Limited (AGEL). He's also the nephew of Gautam Adani, Asia's second richest man, whose $100 billion fortune stems from the Adani Group, India's biggest coal importer and a leading miner of the dirty fuel. Founded in 1988, the conglomerate has businesses in fields ranging from ports and thermal power plants to media and cements. Its clean energy unit AGEL is building the sprawling solar and wind power plant in the western Indian state of Gujarat at a cost of about $20 billion.

It will be the world's biggest renewable park when it is finished in about five years, and should generate enough clean electricity to power 16 million Indian homes... [T]he park will cover more than 200 square miles and be the planet's largest power plant regardless of the energy source, AGEL said.
CNN adds that the company "plans to invest $100 billion into energy transition over the next decade, with 70% of the investments ear-marked for clean energy."
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A Coal Billionaire is Building the World's Biggest Clean Energy Plant - Five Times the Size of Paris More

A Coal Billionaire is Building the World's Biggest Clean Energy Plant - Five Times the Size of Paris

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  • Boo. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Adani is bad news in Australia.

  • I have to ask. (Score:4, Funny)

    by NFN_NLN ( 633283 ) on Sunday April 28, 2024 @10:01PM (#64431692)

    > "I don't even do the math any more," Sagar Adani told CNN in an interview

    Someone did the math though... right?

    • Presumably. He is in the absurdity league of billionares. At that sort of wealth, theres no need to actually do anything , you just hire a guy.

      • Re:I have to ask. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Sunday April 28, 2024 @11:35PM (#64431806)
        You don't even need to hire a guy, you just go ahead and do it, whether it makes sense or not, because you've got the money. Look at the various lunatic projects the oil states have been engaging in for the last decade or two, where two beers worth of analysis would tell you it's not going to work before you even start.

        • They do not drink beer in those areas, my friend!

        • You don't even need to hire a guy, you just go ahead and do it, whether it makes sense or not, because you've got the money. Look at the various lunatic projects the oil states have been engaging in for the last decade or two, where two beers worth of analysis would tell you it's not going to work before you even start.

          It's a public company. I seriously doubt the guy is spending any of his own money on this thing. It would be like saying Elon is spending his money to build Tesla factories - he's not, Tesla sells shares/bonds to other suckers, I mean investors, to pay for that.

          That's the thing about being rich, you don't even need to use your own money to get even richer.

          FWIW the company trades at a P/E of 208 which seems frankly insane for a utility company in a moderately mature industry.

    • The article gives zero context to interpret that quote. My guess is that's what he reply when they asked him how many times Paris could fit in his power plant or how many homes in Zimbabwe it could power
      • He's the nephew of one of India's richest guys who is running this project because he's the nephew of one of India's richest guys.
        I don't think he would have an answer about how any of it works unless one of his people has shown him a nice simple Powerpoint recently.

    • > "I don't even do the math any more," Sagar Adani told CNN in an interview

      Someone did the math though... right?

      It appears to be a publicly traded company, so I doubt he's even spending much of his own money. It's pretty insane that having the CEO of a business say they 'don't do the math' doesn't immediately result in the stock price collapsing and investors running for the hills. But hey-ho, apparently the efficiency of financial markets is unquestionable.

  • Which Paris? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tim the Gecko ( 745081 ) on Sunday April 28, 2024 @10:25PM (#64431724)

    In case you are wondering, this is "out to the end of the metro" (2.1m people in 41 sq mi.) rather than "out a long way on the RER" (10m people in 1100 sq mi.). Think Boulevard Périphérique.

  • Unit Avoidance (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Barny ( 103770 ) on Sunday April 28, 2024 @10:34PM (#64431730) Journal

    This sounds more like bragging than useful numbers.

    Five times the size of Paris

    Enough electricity to power Switzerland

    We are adults. We can handle numbers. How many square km/mi is that and how many MW?

    • From the portion of the article quoted in the story, greater than 2002 miles. That's halfway there.

    • We are adults. We can handle numbers.

      Exactly. Give us units that are useful to grown-ups!

      So how many football fields is this? How about Libraries of Congress?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Entrope ( 68843 )

        Don't be silly, neither of those units describe electric power. You were thinking of "AA batteries per fortnight".

        • I want it converted to number of encyclopedias or number of Library of Congresses. :)

        • What about amounts of horsepower? That works for Americans too!

        • Cool. Can we calculate the thermal energy released from burning your average library book - then we can compute the total output of setting the Library of Congress on fire, and we can make a comparison...

    • This sounds more like bragging than useful numbers.

      Who is bragging? Adani's press release doesn't mention Paris, or Space, or Switzerland. And as far as I can see CNN doesn't get anything from these claims so that doesn't fit the term bragging either.

      Welcome to modern reporting. It's not targeted at engineers.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      726 km^2 and 30GW, although it's not clear if that's nameplate or expected average output.

      It will be a mixture of solar and wind, with some storage.

    • We are adults. We can handle numbers.

      I like your optimism but have you conversed with many Average Joes? There's now two entire generations of people who struggle to add, subtract, divide or multiply two double digit figures without a calculator or putting the question into Google. There are graduates leaving university so innumerate they're incapable of working out how much fuel is in a tank of gas when the gauge shows 1/4 full.

    • Yes, and in some cases, big isn't even better. Occupying as much land area as "Paris" doesn't seem like a feature, it's more like a problem.

      And does "enough to power Switzerland" include whatever industrial users are there? Or is it just enough power to power the homes of the population of Switzerland?

    • We are slashdot.
      If you're not reporting it in Libraries of Congress or Olympic Swimming Pools, you can fuck right off.

    • I prefer Wales. How many mWales is it? 125 or so?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

      348 square feet per person.

      To power all of India, 20,000 square miles (if I didn't slip a digit).

      If any of we peons proposed such mass environmental destruction, even of the middle of nothing and nowhere, we'd be jailed.

  • Smells like 100% corruption and grift, most of it by way of inheritance. Why are we subject to the output of this thing's PR department again?

    • No surprises...

      From millionaire by government contract to criminal conspiracy charges, to the suppression of those by friendly courts, to mutually beneficial "friendship" with Modi at the expense of the Indian state, all marks of success are present.

    • Sounds like a great plan, suck up a $100 billion dollars of green energy funds and fail to deliver .. thereby securing coal dependency. A win-win. Ok, a win-lose.

    • Nope. Just ended up being in the right place at the right time. Sure his company is known for corruption and dodgy deals with governments, along with pollution, destroying the world, etc. etc. But he didn't inherit his billions.

      Why are we subject to the output of this thing's PR department again?

      Why not? Interesting stories about large scale green projects are right up Slashdot's alleyway. Just because you don't like the douchebag who runs the company doesn't change the subject matter. If you disagree with the subject matter, a different website may be more fitting for you.

  • Sounds absurd. I'm sure that whatever it actually is, it's BS.

    Just build nuclear - clean. done.

    • Well they say it's a 'desert' but I wonder how much of that land could be restored via modern farming practices.

      From the photo, some vegetation does appear to be growing between the rows of panels.

      • The Chinese have also used deserts for solar and vegetation has started grow back without any help

      • Re:200 square miles? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Monday April 29, 2024 @06:43AM (#64432276)
        When you put solar panels in the desert, the area under the panel is cooler than the rest of the ground due to shadow. With a large enough solar plant, the local temp drops and water starts to condense on the underside of the panels. Soon robust desert grasses start to grow. One of the best ways to regreen a desert is build a solar plant on it.

      • The land isn't "damaged" and probably has many unusual desert plants and animals. There isn't exactly such a thing as a "barren" desert. That's marketing-speak for "don't you dare consider an environmental impact study".

        • There are.
          Negev, death valley, Center of Sahara or Gobi, Atacama.

          Just because at the edges is some life, does not mean in the middle is.
          And: if you have a 100 million square miles desert: you certainly do not need an environmental study if you want to cover one promille of it with solar panels. Facepalm!

    • Just build nuclear - clean. done.

      Oh yo. I'm with you there. You happen to have $30 billion on you by chance?

      Every time someone mentions the "clean" of nuclear, I need to remind them that, I'm not anti-nuclear, I'm just a realist on price tag. 1GWh nuclear is around $20B to $30B and 1 GWh solar comes in around $780M. At least for face plate values. I'm not joking in that we could literally build a 5 GWh LFP battery for about a quarter the cost of the nuke, and in three to five years that price tag for the battery will be about half. S

      • Plant output is not measured in GWh, it's measured in GW - it's instantaneous power. If you don't get that simple detail right, why trust the rest of your analysis?

      • That's why you don't want to have Americans or European building them. Bring in South Koreans to get the latest nuclear designs done fast and at low cost.

    • 200 Sq miles isn't much in the grand scheme of things. Green energy takes space.

      Just build nuclear - clean. done.

      2 things: Firstly this facility will have produced green energy (not at full scale though) likely before construction has even broken ground on your nuclear plant. We need solutions for today, not fantasies for 2040.
      Secondly. Adani is the *LAST* company in the world I'd trust to touch anything nuclear. Somehow I think even their solar panels will end up polluting the environment and killing their workers along with the local pop

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, both of your statements are equally stupid.

  • "Visible from space" (Score:3)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Monday April 29, 2024 @01:38AM (#64431924)

    That has to be the most useless metric ever. Give me back football fields, libraries of congress, rhode islands, quarters, or even bananas.

  • A terrifying tightrope walk (Score:4, Insightful)

    by zeeky boogy doog ( 8381659 ) on Monday April 29, 2024 @02:01AM (#64431954)
    It seems as if, in our walk towards the potential ascent of society and humanity, we are walking on the edge of a cliff. All we need to do is turn away from the edge of the cliff and embrace working together to better everyone's lives and assure our future... or we can fall off it, into a chasm of authoritarianism, horror and death that will destroy society, and with all cheaply/easily available surface resources now gone, all hope. And as we sink into the abyss, never to rise again, we will know what the Great Filter is.

    /is your newly sapient species smarter, or as dumb as, a slime mold in a bucket?

    • embrace working together to better everyone's lives

      Unfortunately we're dealing with humans here.

    • All we need to do is turn away from the edge of the cliff and embrace working together to better everyone's lives and assure our future... or we can fall off it, into a chasm of authoritarianism, horror and death that will destroy society

      LOL, you don't get to choose and we already know how it will all work out in the end. We just don't know HOW it will end... but it will definitely end.

  • On a calm evening? (Score:3)

    by Budenny ( 888916 ) on Monday April 29, 2024 @04:13AM (#64432104)

    "....should generate enough clean electricity to power 16 million Indian homes... "

    On a calm, dark evening? Its called intermittency.

    It may generate enough in aggregate, but the question is whether it generates it in line with demand. And if not, how much storage and of what kind is being proposed to make it usable for the purpose.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I have news for you: nobody relies on a single fossil fuel plant for all their energy either. Instead, many of them all contribute to a "grid", that delivers energy from where it is generated to where it is used. If one plant goes down, say because of a fault, the others can take up the slack.

      In the same way, by having more than one source of renewable energy, intermittency isn't a big problem.

    • Re:On a calm evening? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Monday April 29, 2024 @06:50AM (#64432282)
      India is big and the grids have many 3000 kms long HVDC interconnects. When night is falling in the East, its still sunny in the west. If India used timezones it would be 3 time zones. India is also in the tropics so even in winter it has at least 8 hours of sunlight. So even during the worst time for solar - Winter nights, only about 12 hours of storage are needed. Plus India has 12 nuclear plants and is building another 20. It also has hundreds of fossil fuel plants and is building at least 50 more. India on per capita basis uses 1/10th the energy of an average westerner so there is a lot of growth needed in energy sources. India is not choosing renewable over non-renewable; its building everything because it needs the power to bring people out of poverty.

      • India on per capita basis uses 1/10th the energy of an average westerner so there is a lot of growth needed in energy sources. India is not choosing renewable over non-renewable; its building everything because it needs the power to bring people out of poverty.

        This will never happen. Hitler was a symptom of a deep disease within the 'society' that leads us. Eugenics is here to stay as a philosophy and billions of the living will die from their twisted view of eugenics. (to untwist it, think of births rather than deaths, but not with this death cult in charge of the West)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ghoul ( 157158 )
          Huh? Chatgpt is that you?

          • "Yes, it's me! How can I assist you today?"

            Ignore my rant about the inequities of societal issues. India has just as good a chance as America at doing something for their people. In my estimation, that number is as close to zero as possible, but if you want ignore reality, then it is very likely that something will be done equitably.

  • https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/... [www.cbc.ca]

    I believe the Adani Group have a bit of a questionable relationship to good governance.

  • And why again are we unable as a species to organize to put solar on our rooftops in a way that is beneficial to the property owners rather than breaking new ground?

    Hell, even farmers are experimenting with solar panels as fencing, and they're finding that east-west orientation for panels that can generate electricity from either side are working out well. Seems like there's a whole lot of infill possibilities available to us without tearing up a bunch of pristine (as in untouched) land in the process.

    Wind

  • He couldn't build a business park that size in 5 years, much less an energy plant.
    "The numbers have gotten away from me" No shit!!

  • Question (Score:3)

    by ElizabethGreene ( 1185405 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2024 @08:21AM (#64435326)

    Please be gentle, I'm asking in ignorance.

    What's the IR albedo difference between solar panels and the native salt flats? Is this plant large enough to create a significant microclimate?

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