Until recently, pacesetting solar projects were measured in the hundreds of megawatts. But panels keep getting cheaper, and developers keep getting better at installing them. As a result, power companies are undertaking projects that are bigger than anyone could have conceived five years ago.

China has led the way on this with a series of installations that push past the gigawatt scale. Other countries aren’t far behind, including the U.S., though it hasn’t reached the gigawatt threshold yet.

Giga-scale construction requires a whole new level of land access, workforce mobilization, and transmission planning. Collectively, these projects presage a future when the sunniest, most remote places in the world serve as electrical breadbaskets, supplying energy to population hubs far away.

Here are three of the most prominent giga-projects currently underway, to give you a sense of just how big solar power plants are becoming and what it takes to make them happen.

Khavda Renewable Energy Park, Gujarat Province, India: 30 GW

The scale of this project is vertigo-inducing. Adani, the corporate empire of self-made billionaire Gautam Adani, has branched out from building ports, airports, and coal plants to manufacturing solar cells and panels, installing them, building transmission lines, and retailing the electricity. This vertically integrated strategy reaches its apotheosis in Khavda, which will have 30 gigawatts of combined solar and wind capacity, and already features one of the world’s largest operating grid batteries.

Adani Green Energy picked a 200-plus-square-mile expanse in the Rann of Kutch, a seasonally flooded salt flat in Gujarat, to turn into this clean energy colossus. The region combines strong winds and blasting sunshine, but makes for a challenging work environment. The company had to run its own fiber optic cable and build a desalination plant to furnish water for the isolated work camp it assembled for 15,000 laborers. Solar panels extend as far as the eye can see, with 5.2-megawatt Adani-made wind turbines interspersed every half mile, so they don’t block each other’s access to strong winds.

Construction began in 2023, and in February 2024, the first 551 megawatts came online, sent via an Adani-owned transmission corridor to customers in Mumbai and elsewhere. Since then, the generation capacity has risen to 13 gigawatts, assisted by robots waterlessly cleaning dust off the panels twice a day.

When Adani realized that some of the power was going to waste during the sunny hours, the company added a battery to the plan. In nine months, workers installed a 1.1-gigawatt/3.5 gigawatt-hour storage facility, which was officially commissioned earlier this month. That impressive scale puts it in contention for largest single-site grid battery in the world, outstripping even the Edwards & Sanborn battery in California’s Mojave Desert.

This hulking battery lets the company sell power after sunset at merchant rates that are much higher than the daytime rates. Adani plans to add another 10 gigawatt-hours of storage there by next April.

“Mr. Adani just bit the bullet and went for it,” Arun Sharma, chief sustainability officer for the Adani Group, told Canary Media on the sidelines of Boston Climate Week. ​“We don’t do anything on the megawatt level — or even hundreds-of-megawatt level. If it is not gigawatt, then our CEOs don’t have the attention span.”

Like Adani, Chinese solar developers are looking for the widest open spaces with the best possible sunshine, and that has led them to the Tibetan Plateau. At a 10,000-foot elevation, the sun shines more brightly than at sea level, and the chilly air helps the panels convert those rays more efficiently.

The country’s largest cluster of solar farms has accumulated at Talatan Solar Park, in Qinghai Province. As of last fall, it could produce nearly 17 gigawatts, and it was still growing, per a rare foreign-media dispatch from the remote region by The New York Times. The solar cluster covers an area equivalent to seven Manhattans.

Indeed, multi-gigawatt solar projects have become commonplace in China. A few more soak up the high-elevation sunshine elsewhere in Qinghai; others catch the light in Xinjiang province and Inner Mongolia. But Talatan towers above them all, in stature and elevation. It helps that few people live on that part of the alpine plateau, and the plant accommodates those who do by installing the panels high enough for sheep to graze beneath them. Starting in the 1990s, China displaced a million people to create an enormous power plant with the Three Gorges Dam, the Times noted, but now it installs solar capacity equivalent to that project every three weeks.

The Central Valley of California churns out one-quarter of the agricultural crop in the U.S., but its water is disappearing. The Westlands Water District has tackled this head-on with a coordinated strategy that, if implemented, would allocate fallow lands for a sprawling 21-gigawatt solar complex, served by a privately developed transmission corridor.

The scale of this would be staggering. If fully built, the Westlands effort would add as much utility-scale solar as the whole state of California has built thus far. It could give California one of the largest solar plants in the world, especially impressive given the state’s famously high cost of doing business, and the elevated solar-panel prices from U.S. trade protectionism.

What makes this project special is how it seeks to overcome the collective action problems stymieing renewables development across much of the U.S. While Gautam Adani can direct his empire with sheer force of will, and the Chinese government can clear the way for its long-range energy plans, the U.S. doesn’t typically have a centralized entity planning energy, transmission lines, permitting, water supplies, and optimal land use. But the Westlands district has taken on that role as an evolution of its historical duties coordinating water infrastructure on behalf of its members.

The project could inject much-needed clean energy for California’s quest to phase out fossil fuels by 2045. Plus, with its incentives for farmers and requirement of a community benefits plan, it could also model how clean energy can help communities adapt to a changing environment without leaving people behind.