From Coal to Solar in New Delhi | Years of Living Dangerously

I love this. I love the story behind it. This is one of our project sites in the city of New Delhi in India. It's a 3 megawatt solar power plant. It uses U.S. technology in terms of solar panels and mounting structures, and it also has cells and panels made in India.

There used to be a coal power plant many, many years ago, and you see a lot of coal dust on the ground right now that we have compressed while building our project site. You've got the coal power plant that took eight years to build, polluted the atmosphere, and you have the solar plant in the coal pit that took 8 days to build.

Coal is still happening in this country; it will continue to happen for quite a long time. But at the same time, they've made this incredible commitment to renewables, and that's really what our story is about. I think we just have to recognize coal is going to be part of the mix. So the question then becomes: what do you do about it?

This is a calculation that India is going to have to make, depending on how quickly they're able to scale up on the renewables. You can't help but be optimistic standing here. To me, optimism breeds optimism. If you look at how quickly we are building these projects and how quickly the Indian government is rolling out new projects, it's phenomenal and unprecedented in history.

Today, with a 100 GW commitment of solar power in India, the Indian government is making a very large commitment to shift the new generation capacity towards renewable energy. This is the story right here. Can we just put up a goddamn solar field? When you look at it from the top, we're trying to improve the lives of what eventually will be 1.2 billion Indians.

It seems impossible, but when I saw the solar power, I thought, okay, for some reason that makes it manageable. You think we can accomplish that? That can be done.