National Geographic Megastructures featuring Adani’s Solar Power Plant.

as the bird flies two and a half million solar modules swimming in more than 2500 acres of land with 8500 pairs of hands at work during the peak of the project no talent is too big for a novel too far putting up an ambitious display of the finest and solar technology a robotic system does not use any sort of water or electricity while racing towards a tight deadline managing the engineering procurement project management and site construction in such a short span was a huge challenge even when mother nature decides to throw in a few surprises we went to hell and back the team would try not to let anything eclipse their progress we are planning for taking precautions during a partial solar eclipse as they paved breakdowns and away - oh God this chemical an unstable Volquez of total state grade-a unstable nucleus Java head aiming to make one of the world's largest solar power plants in a single location in an unassuming part of southern India 648 megawatts of clean green electricity will soon be generated and exported to the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu by March 31st 2016 and putting this massive solar power plant together on time is a team of dedicated and energetic engineers contractors and personnel at Adani one of India's leading infrastructure conglomerates this is an inside look at a mega structure that is India's solar power house bright and fiery and mighty generous our glorious Sun has always been radiating light in beauty but never before has its power been harnessed the way it has been in the 21st century and now more than ever with depleting fossil fuels worldwide the Sun takes center stage India is one of the fastest growing economy and energy is a crucial part for economic development huge demand for energy has led to hospitalization of nature of the subject to meet the surging demand solar energy is the best form of energy energy from Sun is free nowadays it's public airports kitchens and planes and these go to the future one country is taking long and fast strides towards a national goal of becoming one of the world leaders and solar power generation by 2022 India by 75 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2020 that's a huge energy commitment especially as India is generating only around one-fifth of its goal right now with some 36 gigawatts of renewable power generation out of this only 4060 megawatts of the power generation comes from solar a number India wants to inflate to 100,000 megawatts by 2022 or powering nearly 60 million Indian homes something like electrifying one in a quarter the number of households in the United Kingdom and for that India needs something mega power producer land requirement is huge and you know land is a big task in a country like India which is highly populous the solution lay near the South Indian city of Madurai and Tamil Nadu which is home to a unique structure that has captured the imagination of pilgrims and tourists alike the minashi temple 14 coppa Rams of this awe-inspiring madurai meenakshi amman temple rise into the sky this ancient place of worship welcomes thousands of devotees every day who come to seek the blessings of goddess Meenakshi and her husband Shiva the temple is famous for its 1000 pillared Hall an architectural marvel instructed way ahead of its time it is only fitting then that some 90 kilometers away from Madurai in a little-known town called Camus T arises a mega structure that has the potential to be monumental in its own way for such a mega-sized solar power plant we require a huge patch of land also the good solar radiations and the proximity with port for logistics purpose and all this be found at Camus t in Tamil Nadu and this was the beginning of how we started this project the donnie group claims its plant will generate a maximum of six hundred forty eight megawatts of power making it one of the world's largest single location solar power plants India as a tremendous hope of generating solar energy and it is high tide we concentrate more on conservation of solar radiation it's one of the most important factors in power generation solar irradiance is the measure of the amount of sun rays that falls on the surface a happy problem of plenty in a country like India which masks in the Sun for around 300 days a year tomorrow district man solar irradiation both Giada has covered yesterday with the engineers from Adani reached the site at Camus tea in July 2015 they realized the gigantic task at hand the total land allocated for this project was 2500 acres that's like packing in nearly sixty Taj Mahal's on a patch of land over time the company had acquired the land needed for the project now what had to follow was meant tense planning and rapid-fire execution to meet the deadlines the size of 648 megawatt in next eight months period is unimaginable for anybody for the team that meant slippin into overdrive from the get-go we are planning to have all the infrastructure facility in place in the month of August this month only so we are planning to build a huge site office and we are planning to have the illumination facility so that we can work around the clock it wasn't going to be easy though one of the initial challenges in a remote agrarian non industrial town like camus D was sourcing manpower and equipment I think is our level is moderate which is 90 kilometers away he went to get a couple of acres you need to hide from other so getting planning to missionary from nearby is rolled out and if they didn't get their machinery in place the engineers would be in trouble the first load of containers was arriving by late August from China these containers with solar modules and module mounting structures would need a home immediately a very large haul 140,000 square meters of space imagine nearly six Sydney Opera House's stacked together that's the kind of area this project would need at storage it's August 2015 and the team in Adani is scrambling to get the open storage area ready for the hundreds of containers that would soon be unloaded at site site and the magnitude of the work we need to do it we thought we're going to be 10 more than what we could shoot by September 2015 the shipment from China had started arriving and the site was nowhere near ready major tuskys you may get your site but how do you do on loading and reduced oh no one in the world has attempted setting up a solar power plant of this magnitude critical components like inverters would need closed warehouses when these weren't getting ready in time the project management team had to make some quick decisions like hiring godowns at Camus tea till the warehouses on site got ready that would happen only by mid-october a delay of more than a month from the time the containers started arriving on site or a large-scale project on a tight deadline this was not the start the team was hoping for it was already September just seven months left to the finish line only after sorting all of this out could the team get cracking on actually installing solar modules that will eventually generate electricity solar energy works on a simple principle the sun's rays fall on solar cells which convert sunlight into electricity when sunlight hits the surface of a panel it excites electrons in the cells and they start to flow out as direct current the direct current gets converted to alternating current using inverters and finally in most cases this clean and renewable form of energy gets exported to the grid on a large scale once the land was acquired it was all hands on deck with design and execution powering through simultaneously with seven months still to go for commissioning work began full steam at Camus tea around the same time the head of protection and metering Sumeet Sharma was one of the men tasked with thinking through the data monitoring and control systems that would eventually be installed at Site C when you have a geographically spread installations then it's difficult to manage the system manually and you need an automation system which can actually give you information and you are also able to do control operations for the spread out installations that system which is utilized for such a widespread installations we call it SCADA in this particular supervisory control and data acquisition system or SCADA was installed for a particular feature internally called the control philosophy this feature will allow for limits to be set remotely on power generation depending on the grid requirement on any given day instead of field engineers being set on-site to turn down inverters according to the grids demand since we are building a very huge solar plant of a scale of minus 640 megawatts power the fluctuation in our solar plant will be actually affecting the grid operations so in that case the grid operations will request us to actually maintain the power of you're planted a fixed output so you need an aspect in the SCADA system in the control automation systems which can help you do that function meanwhile on ground at kamut II there were not a moment's rest to be had less than seven months left to complete installation and plenty of ground still to be covered first level the large tracts of land and grade it using graders the long blades level the land and prepare it for the next step plotting surveyors sweep into action and start marking points on the ground piles will be driven into these exact points aisles are structures made of steel that will eventually support the all-important solar module what makes this difference here is the size of this plant to complete the whole project around 3.8 relax while bored we have constructed time a serega egg DNA bar associate pond'rous oak or maybe up to doha Java pile a ham loop delivering the large number of piles was throwing up a challenge for the quality team were almost 400,000 piles to be laid on site the team needed several contractors and they all had to be brought up to speed on standard operating procedures and how to make the perfect pile we had new workforce coming in from all parts of the country we had also turnaround of workforce as well as contractors and we had to also push the contractors to the degree that they are punching above their weights all of this was eating into time the team didn't have especially people like Quality Manager Manoj who had to supervise the simple yet critical process he had to ensure that the piles pass a pullout test a pressure of 1200 kilograms per square centimeter is applied to the pile and if it stays put in place it passes the pullout test an indication that the pile can survive high wind speeds and any other force of nature eventually two and a half million modules will rest easy on these tables of galvanized steel the panels alone will occupy an area of twelve hundred seventy acres enough to take in four hundred seventy six football fields these module mounting structures or MMS have been grouped into tables with a specific capacity one table can generate almost 50 kilowatts peak electricity the amount of metal being used to make these piles tables and towers is mind-boggling around 30,000 metric tons of galvanized steel you could construct more than for iPhone towers with that much steel the entire six hundred forty eight megawatt plant is made up of clusters of modules of four to five megawatts each and inverters are a link to the solar modules an inverted job is to convert direct current into alternating current and 144 pre-engineered buildings are being made just to house the 576 inverters required for this plan all this would require a lot of cabling wires of different shapes and thicknesses are connecting the dots in this massive solar puzzle almost seventy seven hundred kilometers long these cables can run all the way from New Delhi India to Perth in Australia ST cable this is a highly manual intensive process 50 persons are required for pulling 15 meter cables at a single point of time after all this heavy lifting the engineers finally started installing solar modules only in the month of October 2015 and they had set themselves an initial daily target to install three megawatts a day though that in six months and with a little push towards the end they complete 648 megawatts mega as a benchmark for us to develop this plant but many people are still laughing at us how can I three my god can be done it's a busy site with clusters of solar modules dedicated inverters control rooms which yards and substations coming up like an assembly line for power generation the company's game plan is to keep commissioning pockets of electricity leading up to the final evacuation or exporting of the total capacity of the plant through the grid towards this the site is being divided into five units of different capacities before us the largest solar power plant at a single location was in California in the US that period was completed in around three years we were looking for a setting of 6:48 Megawati and that also ended in a year on-site and off-site though there were some dark clouds looming and waiting to wash away plants deadlines and dream it's the end of October 2015 five months to go for one of the world's largest single location solar power plants to come up in Tamil Nadu India projects gets completed within schedule and within the budget these are the two main parameters for measuring the success of the project and now to pull off something like this so meet and his team we're going to have to work closely with ABB the power and automation company that was executing the SCADA system for the plan the folks at ABB have called the engineers from Adani to test the plant monitoring SCADA system and its control philosophy feature the testing and automation engineers had a lot of two days for checking out the customized SCADA before shipping it off to committee in order to deliver the systems on time to the site but that didn't happen two days became one month another timeline setback the engineers had to absorb challenge was that we had multiple suppliers of equipments for example the relays the control and protection relays the inverter themselves and all of that has to be validated with the supervisory control and data acquisition system now to do that in some time some situations it was not possible for us to get the actual equipment while one set of engineers were busy testing the SCADA system in Bangalore back in committee work was slowing down for the rest of the team as the northeast monsoons descended upon South India actually we planned this project to complete in eight Mandir Asian so in a normal way we are heading with three megawatt per day of model mounting structure and module installation and during the monsoon season it goes down to one point five megawatt per day basis but things did not go as per plan the reason being the 2015 northeast monsoons met experts spend it on the El Nino effect as one of the reasons behind the devastating floods that hit parts of Tamil Nadu and other parts of southern India the rains ravaged cities in town in the last 100 years hadn't seen water work as mean and devastating as the 2015 flood meanwhile the teams were missing every internal monthly target body when I'm gone I've got a GI Joe game head yep whatever yeah yeah I'm a heart attack in in October they managed to set up only one point six megawatts of solar modules as against the target of nighty Mequon they should have set up eighty inverters they managed only ten they wanted to build 20 pre-engineered buildings who housed the inverse they hit zero barely fifty kilometers of cables were lay when they were hoping too late ten times the length November didn't look any better either looking at a lot I've lost you to these monsters we were in shambles do we able to now reach our target by much to complete all these left our jobs and to read the 648 my god we really lost hope to reach there if it was possible things took a turn for the worse in December 2015 when work came to a grinding halt I'll I'm from Tamil Nadu and I haven't seen this degree of rain any time in my life and we had a huge amount of rain coming in a very short span of time as a result in the whole land becomes champion mocchi really it was a very very horriffic see the water may have been just knee-deep inside but the logistics got hit hard when the team got word that Tuticorin the port town closest to the site was badly affected by the rain our whole site is filled with water the total import was completely stocked the logistic chain is absolutely was not working and we were absolutely the standstill for these three months the poor debt to dakorón thumb 110 kilometers away from the site was a crucial part of the operations it's one of the 12 major ports in India and is located in the Gulf of man arm just for this project alone the port will receive more than six thousand containers from all over the world including countries like China Japan Malaysia I want Israel Italy Germany Turkey and Switzerland less than four months were left damage control was the need of the hour the corporate office and Amna bad was weighing in on their ideas to emergency meeting with all departments at the side office is underway to assess the damage and plot the way forward the group has to take some drastic steps with rain pelting down logistics were proving to be the biggest challenge of them all the other bodies who Nikki current Tommy caffee dicta Dukas am Neckar Nevada he's my uncle roscas also container unloading karika target car Hyundai Kia Gap area Dada Korea how many chansik between unloading except Mitchell ooh Kia I'm not gonna stop zip as a sport porque and feather a chore bill grant a work English RTO president Paragon team account of the day you see the rhythm that receiving and permutation property or change guardianship from meadow from their company kia kaha from 2,500 workers on site they had to pull in more than three times the number nearly eighty five hundred and twenty four hours in a day would not be enough our asking rate close to 10 megawatt so 10 megawatt means 40,000 modules we have to place in one day it's a Herculean task we are pushing all the material in the night so that by the time when majority of the worker comes in the day they will be available with the resources the focus shifted to making up for lost time that meant working day and night for a few months on the trial by the end of 2015 though the plant had slowly started to recover and was gunning for a 648 megawatt commissioning in the next three months the monsoon of this financially I was rigorous and we allowed the water to flow into the nearby ponds and drains and the future we will see that proper pathways are made trains are made so that it gets into the local brain cell phones as the monsoons receded hundreds of containers were making their way from the port and tuticorin to the site ready to be unloaded the company has sourced component from multiple vendors across the world for instance eight different manufacturers from China Japan Malaysia and Italy are supplying just solar modules alone 2015 ended up on a terrible note or the ambitious solar power plane almost at the point of giving up the team had got a second wind and plunged themselves into work the personnel on site had to install 126 megawatts of solar modules in January with around-the-clock attitude they punched in 163 megawatts but the engineers were struggling with their inverter deadlines barely installing 40 odd inverters when they should have done 112 in January alone chef emé noticed our attendance at a buddy telling Emily Oh pfft Thomas Corder process for a fairway inverter a stolen something back in the control rooms of the plant the SCADA system was getting installed and tested on site portions of clean green solar power we're starting to get evacuated from the plan already there are officials from the tamil' Naidu generation and distribution corporation to do some preliminary checks on site there are a lot of exercises which are required because what we are connecting when the plant of this size is actually getting connected to the power grid on the disturbances which can happen is important and we have to isolate the sections as soon as the fault happens so that the National Grid is not disturbed at all at the end of the day when it comes to electricity a grid has to always remain stable it's February 2016 the time had come to test the premise behind the control philosophy and SCADA when the grid asked for only a minimum amount of electricity to be exported on any particular day and we have to make it 25 let's make it that set point for 25 megawatts now okay then it's responding now suppose my inverter is generating one megawatt at a given point of time and I want it to generate lesser I can give us a month from the SCADA from the screen and it will generate 500 kilowatts only as per my requirement or as for the grid dimension plant monitoring systems also given an accurate indication of electricity being generated literally every minute solar power production generally Peaks between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. however sometimes there are factors that affect solar power production typically in a power plant the output depends on the radiation level on a given day this project is spread over an area of 2500 acres so it might so happen that one small part of this area has a cloud cover so generation in that part might be affected momentarily and if not cloudy or rainy day electricity generation and take a hit if modules are dusty luckily solar power plants are relatively easy to maintain an average photovoltaic cell may last 25 years or more if you regularly clean the module in Camus t what would otherwise have been a manual and water intensive job has now been mechanized with state-of-the-art robotic technology from Israel powered by a solar panel the charges during the day units on batteries aerobic will go for a clean ever evening waterless cleaning technology is a game changer for semi-arid dry regions like Camus D where it is a scarce resource this robotic solar panel cleaning system uses soft microfiber on wheel that push dust off the modules the robotic system can be remotely monitored managed and controlled the site at kamut e was beginning to take shape through January and February where more work was done in two months than the preceding five but March was upon the team and three hundred megawatts of solar modules still had to get installed and that meant putting up 12 megawatts of solar modules a day without a miss not easy especially when there were a few surprise tests in store for the plant and the men behind it the people of Camus tea in the southern Indian state of India to mill Naidu we're hoping the worst was behind them the exceptional monsoons had receded but along with that so had the timelines for the engineers on site who were trying to build one of the world's largest single location solar power plant as February drew to a close there were some nervous engineers on site wondering if the inverters would be ready on time Amita Hamada Chilean sub say Geronimo some gazelle Andra Suchy is time to connect earlier I'm a dominant Muslim nerdist up here out of the 576 inverters required 205 had still not been installed or connected despite the grim statistics there was an incurable optimism setting in to the team now it's not the time to look back we are a lot of work to do so focus ourselves how do we do it vamonos opreis BSB Marquess a doctor yet Caro a game on Papa's death Nazarian with renewable energy like solar power getting its time in the Sun in India there is a strong case building up for solar whether it's a mega park or on someone's roof the trend is very promising rooftop solar is classified as industrial commercial and residential going by statistics for a state like Tamil Nadu in India its added about 19 megawatts of rooftop solar out of which 4 megawatts is in the residential rooftop solar itself so that is a growing awareness the rich' an Arvind installed a 3 kilowatt solar power plant on their apartment terrace in Chennai a couple of years ago then they took it a step further we have an electric car and I like to think of my car is running free because the powers of the solar farm and the area under the solar plant I can use it and that made a small group of garden richa and Arvind may represent a growing population of independent power producers but for scale and impact mega solar power plants like the one almost completed at Camus tea can make a big difference to power generation with just a few weeks to go before the completion the operations and maintenance team were finding themselves troubleshooting a fair amount control room in charge Sorento bus and his colleagues are investigating the alert messages flashing on SCADA we just weren't taking Benadryl what happening is there the transformer in the switchyard was overheating because a fan had broken down a transformers ambient temperature is around 50 degrees Celsius but now it was a hot 83 degrees and if the transformer trips it could spell trouble for the plant and the grid coming on temperature is decreasing actually a transformer trip oh ji-hun Luke Java generation there are a hundred megawatt deira and moreover dose of this chemical I'm indeed also pleased chemically unstable homie at the current state grid stay unstable Monica charged with renewable energy it's always a two-way street a solar power plant operates on the principle of making hay while the sun shine but come sundown solar power production stops unlike an off-grid system that stores power and batteries and kicks in when there is no electricity a power plant like this is what is called a grid interactive Stoller power plant typically in a solar power plant the generation stops around 6:30 in the evening but we need power to run equipments like SCADA lighting systems and so on so we take back power from the State Electricity Board this is called back flow essentially back flow is we taking power from the grid to power our systems here whenever we are not generating power young engineers like sharee Rome and others have to keep their eyes on the finish line with 20 odd days to go the team still has to install 180 megawatts of solar modules can they do it or did they bite off more than they can chew especially when there were elements at play that would eclipse their progress as of 2013 around 1.2 billion people around the world have little or no access to electricity and more than 20% of that population lives in India in the year 2022 India will celebrate 75 years of independence the present government has a vision to provide 24/7 affordable environment-friendly power for all by 2022 we are not just thinking of the welfare of 10,000 odd people working for us we are also thinking of all the people of India in plants like these are fast helping bridge the demand supply gap in the nation jung-soo red key yoku dirty Takata was to use car key was cookin alert car kiraku you stirring a Yup'ik it nesara garage in Corsica till then we will use that power there Vinci and his friends who live and study in Camus D will be a few of the many beneficiaries of one of the world's largest single location solar power plants wind commission dentist and everybody clear so La Petite air in Miami Sarah Adi mccracken Sri Ala Moana McCulloch Polly Polly Walker Paulo very so so hardened neural angle keeper school nobody care minimal and Rio loved it there was a minor curve ball coming the way of the engineers India would see a partial solar eclipse on the 9th of March between 505 and 647 am solar eclipse presents one of the biggest fluctuations so lap mark led by in a very very short span during our total or partial eclipse the energy production former plant decreases and then suddenly Rises exponentially which could result in brownout fuses though the partial eclipse would happen in the wee hours of the morning when solar power production would be quite low the team wanted to use the natural occurrence as a test run of sorts for the future to see if the engineers and the plant could handle the fluctuations that eclipses may cause in a power plant we are planning for taking precautions during partial solar eclipse a solar plant great Tony when I go to grid and balance or yoga physically a vigil majority a key solar eclipse recognition is a de la gomera bicep Dexter Angus cool with the safety glass controlled Omega ready monitoring gel tira here is a solar eclipse over opium blue jacket plant immediately physically it is CAG a problem I was protecting the Sun played peekaboo briefly but the engineers read the game well and set a plan in place for future eclipses back at the site with 15 days to go before commissioning there was a stock taking visit by the CEO of a Donnie power banette Jane there was a lot riding on the plan and he had to motivate supervise and ensure completion if the company had to honor its contract with the state of Tamil Nadu I was not very sure that that is even in a position to complete the balance book by the end of the month roughly 120 megawatts of solar modules still had to get erected supervisors of every department were pushing their teens to keep up the pace you could sense nervous energy on-site at Camus tea the last clusters of panels are being erected connections made system checks completed Jesus a pushy a um I'm tired of them GoPro unit already ski commission cars ok or amarga for you mitigate at this master comeback appeal unit with Commissioner K what are they get it's the morning of March 31st and the team at Camus tea are still putting modules on structures while engineers rush about checking these modules in making sure they are working 360 megawatts is already being evacuated to the grid and the remaining would flow out as soon as the state grid gets ready to receive it it support equipment of my life together we achieved the unachievable 638 megawatt solar power plant is a big pride for all of us is a big play for ironic guru is a big pride for the manor do and is a bit right for this country for the entire Adani Group March 31st 2016 turned out to be a real good day at the office this flower power plant will light up the lives of millions of people a true mega structure and a baby step towards the company's next target setting up a solar park in Rajasthan to generate 10,000 megawatts of solar power by 2022 you

Channel: Adani Group

Views: 1,305,847

Rating: 4.8574986 out of 5

Keywords: AdaniSolar, SolarEnergy, NationalGeographic, India, SustainableEnergy, Megastructures, Sun, RenewableEnergy, GreenerPlanet, GoGreen, EcoFriendly

Id: gM-0lrIxCnE

Length: 41min 22sec (2482 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 16 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/bull500]

Thank you for posting this. Been wanting to see this! :D

[u/Kripala]

Nice. Keep at it India.

[u/platinumgus18]

This is not a usual Megastructures episode so I guess this will only be shown in India. Nat Geo has been making India-centric documentaries through Indian film production companies for a while now. Looks like they used a guy with a foreign accent for the voiceover to make it seem like it's a part of the international megastructures TV series which is broadcasted all over the world. I mean it's nice to see this stuff being covered but I'd like us to be able to build truly marvelous stuff that could be shown all over the world as one of a kind thing.

[u/PauperPhilosopher]

One question. A similar project of a huge scale was taken up by someone else,The birds who flew above it were fried and their wings burnt as they dived down ,Does this plant do the same?

I hope very soon we can have solar on our roofs so that we can have free energy :)