Indian billionaire Gautam Adani is building the world’s largest solar farm near the border with Pakistan.
The plant will be five times the size of Paris, visible from outer space, cost $20 billion and produce enough energy to power 16 million homes.
If the Adani name is vaguely familiar, that is because he wanted to spend $350 million in Pasquotank County a few years ago to build the largest solar array east of the Mississippi.
Elizabeth City and Pasquotank County officials and economic developers, backed by agricultural interests, blocked the project. The 3,500-acre “desert” site still sits mostly empty except for sprawling fields of cash crops.
The Elizabeth City area could use a guy like Gautam Adani. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended the wedding of Adani’s daughter. He is on a first-name basis with Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Google brought a trans-Atlantic internet cable ashore in Virginia Beach a few years ago. Pichai was looking for a location for a server farm. Adani might have put in a good word for Pasquotank County, if he had been welcomed here.
City and county fathers and economic developers complained that the 3,500-acre solar farm would block other development north of town. Farmers said they could not till crops under low-slung solar arrays the way they can under Avangrid’s massive Amazon wind farm turbines.
They complained, despite information to the contrary, that solar panels contained dangerous chemicals that could pollute the soil.
Elizabeth City already is associated with Avangrid’s “Amazon” wind farm. Imagine the buzz if we were home to a Google facility and a 5-square-mile solar farm. There’s no telling who might knock on our door.
We think that we know what businesses developers should want to start in Pasquotank County.
The airpark across Consolidated Road sounded like a good idea 15 years ago. It still sits, empty.
Only the entrepreneurs with their own money at risk and sharp pencils really know what might work here. We should listen to them. They may know other businesspeople who want to take a shot at our community.
Adani understands that to lift millions of his countrymen out of poverty it will take energy, lots of it. He owns one of the biggest coal mines in the world, the Carmichael Mine, in Australia, along with coal and oil interests in India. He and a partner plan to spend $140 billion in the next 15 years on green energy, including hydrogen.
Adani believes he can cut the price of hydrogen from as much as $8 per kilogram to $1 in 10 years.
With 1.4 billion people, India is now the world’s most populous nation, eclipsing China in 2022.
“More than 600 million people in India will be coming into middle income and upper income over the next decade, decade and a half,” Adani said. “They cannot be deprived of basic needs of energy.”
He has said that activists in the developed world fail to understand the staggering challenge facing India to grow its economy and its clean energy industry at the same time.
These are some of the same challenges we face in northeastern North Carolina. Adani could have helped us, but we chased him away.
Plenty of restaurant chains are interested in feeding us. Despite our preferences, the big development dollars are in solar farms, windmills and server farms.
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