Wind dance

The scene left me speechless. One, because I was seeing a wind turbine for the first time. Second, I was seeing thousands of them together.

I was travelling from Thiruvanantapuram to Tirunelveli by road, when I came across the white soldiers, standing tall against a backdrop of coconut trees and mountains, on both sides of the road, dancing to the tune of wind. Aralvaimozi, a little-known village in Nagercoil district of Tamil Nadu is placed at the top on the energy map of the world.

A few kilometers north of Kanyakumari, against the backdrop of the rugged hills, the landscape is dotted as far as the eye can see with three-bladed wind turbines rising above the coconut plantations.

It's a spectacular jungle of thousands of wind turbines, turn away silently, as the wind whistles through the coconut trees, pumping nearly 450 MW of electricity into the southern grid.

No pollution, no noise. It's an out-of-the-world experience to travel on this stretch either by train or by bus, and watch the three thousand wind turbines working in unison (with grid frequency) to generate millions of units of electricity.

One of the largest wind farms in the world, Aralvaimozhi is a success story today of the state government's renewable energy mission. The steady flow of wind for these wind-mills is made possible because Aralvaimozhi is situated on a mountain gap (pass) in the Western Ghats, through which the wind gushes, throughout the year.

Over two decades and about Rs 2,500 cr investment later, this sleepy village has seen a fantastic transformation - an impoverished village with little or no infrastructure facilities have given way to a village with bungalows and several colleges and institutions offering professional courses in engineering and medicine.