Adani's Khavda Park Reaches 13 GW as India and China Cut Coal for First Time in Half a Century

Adani's Khavda Park Reaches 13 GW as India and China Cut Coal for First Time in Half a Century The world's largest renewable complex is reshaping India's power mix as cheaper Chinese panels accelerate the economics of the clean energy build-out. Thirteen gigawatts are already flowing from a 730-square-kilometre patch of Gujarati scrubland near India's border with Pakistan. The Adani Group's Khavda Renewable Energy Park — a combined solar and wind complex that will eventually reach 30 GW of capacity, backed by utility-scale batteries to supply power around the clock — is no longer a planning document. Construction started in 2023, and the first 551 MW came online in February 2024. At full build-out, the park alone would cover roughly 4% of India's current electricity consumption, according to the Economist.^3,7 That scale matters because it arrives alongside a data point that would have seemed improbable a decade ago. Coal-fired generation fell in both India and China in 2025, the first simultaneous year-on-year decline in half a century, after each country added record volumes of clean energy capacity, according to Carbon Brief analysis. India's coal output dropped 3.0% year-on-year, or 46 terawatt hours. For two economies that still run their grids overwhelmingly on coal — India gets close to three-quarters of its electricity from the fuel and has 39 new coal plants under construction — the reversal is statistically significant even if its permanence is far from guaranteed.^6,4 The economics underpinning Khavda's build-out are shifting faster than the physical construction. China has announced it will halt approvals of some new domestic solar projects this year and cut subsidies to developers, a move designed to slow an oversupplied domestic industry. The effect, industry experts cited by the Observer Research Foundation noted, is that photovoltaic panel prices in India could fall by as much as 25%. That makes India one of the largest potential beneficiaries of Chinese policy retrenchment: cheap modules accelerate project returns while India's own manufacturing base — with annual solar-cell capacity of roughly 3 GW against demand running at 20 GW — remains structurally dependent on imported equipment, according to India's Ministry of New and Renewable Energy.¹ The dependency cuts both ways. Lower module prices improve project economics and grid competitiveness but expose Indian developers to supply-chain concentration risk and undercut the domestic manufacturing ambitions the government has promoted. If Chinese export volumes tighten rather than expand following the subsidy cuts, the price relief could prove transient, squeezing project pipelines that have been pencilled in at current landed costs.¹ Demand is not standing still either. The IEA projects AI workloads and data centres alone will account for as much as 4% of global electricity consumption by 2030, adding a fast-growing load class that favours round-the-clock supply — precisely the service Khavda's battery storage component is designed to provide. The race to match dispatchable clean capacity against always-on industrial demand is becoming a feature of major power markets globally, but the scale of the build required in India is exceptional given the starting point.⁵ India's renewable targets have a credibility problem that the Khavda progress does not fully resolve. The country pledged to reach 175 GW of renewable capacity by 2022 — a deadline it missed. A single 30 GW project, even one as large as Khavda, cannot substitute for the grid infrastructure, transmission capacity, and policy consistency needed to integrate variable generation at national scale.¹ Still, the simultaneous coal declines in China and India in 2025 suggest something structural is shifting in Asian power markets, not just a cyclical weather effect. BloombergNEF analysis cited by TechCrunch has solar becoming the largest single power source globally by the mid-2030s, surpassing coal, oil and natural gas. China's decision to constrain its own new capacity approvals — however temporary — opens space for third-country deployment of its manufacturing surplus, with India the most consequential recipient given its pipeline size.^2,1 The unresolved question for traders watching Indian power and coal demand is whether the 2025 coal dip marks an inflection or a single data point inflated by a good monsoon and one exceptional project's early commissioning. India's coal import and domestic production trajectory over the next two to three winters will say more than any one year's generation figures. Watch India's coal import volumes and whether Khavda's battery dispatch data, when it becomes public, shows the round-the-clock profile that justifies the investment thesis.^6,7