The KSPP project is located in the state of Tamil Nadu in the southwest of India, 90 km from Madurai and spreads over an area of 2,500 acres (1,012 hectares) in the district of Ramanathapuram [1,2]. The plant has peak electricity generating capacity of 648 megawatts (MW) by using photovoltaic (PV) technology. The project construction took eight months in total and was completed in June 2016 by the power producer Adani Group [1]. The entire planning, designing, and building process involved project costs of US 670 million and lasted 18 months, which some argue to be just a quarter of the time required to construct a fossil-fuel power plant of similar size [5].

In 2017, an article in The New Indian Express stated that local residents are claiming the KSPP to be a “water guzzler” [8]. According to the article, approximately 2 lakh (200,000 liters) of water are required to wash the 25 lakh (2,500,000) solar modules on a daily basis. Villagers are asserting that the water comes from borewells five kilometers away, “without permissions from the district authorities” [8]. 

In order to transport the water, it is said that approximately 40 tractors have been contracted by Adani Green Energy. These tractors will extract on a daily basis about 6,000 to 8,000 liter tanks close to the Gundar riverbed on the Kamuthi-Mudukalutar road. If the solar panels are not kept clean, the production would drop by 25 percent [8]. 

The KSPP plant’s head S.K. Sharma told the New Indian Express that the company Adani Group had outsourced the cleaning work to other contractors. Consequently, it is up to these contractors to manage the source of water [8]. Further, a revenue official confirmed that no one has the right to sell groundwater, but that it is happening in the case of the cleaning contractors [8]. The leader Seeman of the Tamil-nationalist party NTK (Naam Tamilar Katchi) [9] accused the state’s government of providing full support to the Adani Group, the right to acquire land and set up an exclusive substation by the company TANTRASCO (Tamil Nadu Transmission Corporation Limited). According to Seeman, the company TANTRASCO started to exploit the water resource [8].

Further, a news platform published that women in the state Ramanathapuram gathered outside the KSPP plant in 2018, in order to express their protest against the Adani Group, which failed to honor the pledge to provide jobs in exchange for the land given by the women for constructing the KSPP [11]. Moreover, the Tamil-located TV-channel SunNews published a video on their YouTube-page in February 2018, showing local people protesting against the Adani Group [10]. The video’s protest can be summarized as follows: ”Adani team had promised a deal to give employment to the people for selling their farming lands for cheaper prices and now they have not lived up to their promises. They are also taking away their drinking water from Kottamedu river. People are protesting to demand their rightful jobs and also asking them to stop taking away the water from Kottamedu.” (unofficial translation).

The KSPP project was completed and started electricity production in 2016 before the protest started in 2017. The reaction by the plant’s security head S.K. Sharma was that the utilization of groundwater was specifically put into the contract with the cleaning contractor. The leading ranks of the Adani Group did not further comment on the issue [8].

Technically, the power plant contains 25 lakh of individual solar panels in total. [1] (1 lakh in the Indian numbering system is equivalent to a hundred thousand (100,000)). A robotic system is being installed that cleans the photovoltaic (PV) panels on a daily basis. The robotic system is charged by solar power, making it an energetically self-sustaining system. [1]

The KSPP is expected to generate 11,000 MW of solar energy during the first five years of production. 576 inverters and 154 transformers, as well as 6,000 km of cables, are installed in the KSPP project. For the installation and construction of the whole power plant, equipment and machinery were sourced from various parts of the world. The whole project was mounted at a speed of 11MW per day for which 8,500 personnel per day were required. [13]

The plant is built by the independent power producer Adani Group [1] and had total project costs of US 679 million [2]. TANTRASCO (Tamil Nadu Transmission Corporation Limited) is building the electrical sub-station with 400 KV to transfer the electricity generated. [6] The company ABB established the connection between the KSPP and the national grid, which was completed on June 13th, 2016. [7]