Reliance Industries Ltd., which gets more than half of its revenue from oil refining and petrochemicals, plans to spend 600 billion rupees on four “giga factories” to make solar modules, hydrogen, fuel cells and to build a battery grid to store electricity.
Reliance’s “giga factories” will manufacture solar modules, enabling 100 gigawatts of solar energy by 2030, including on-rooftop installations in villages across the country, large-scale grid batteries to store electricity, and building and installing electrolysers for separating green hydrogen from water.
The company’s ardent plan was unveiled to shareholders at Reliance’s virtual 44th Annual General Meeting held by Mukesh Ambani. The three-year plan involves a $10.1 billion push into clean energy, marking a new milestone for one of the world’s biggest fossil-fuel billionaires.
While Ambani provided little details on how the plan would be executed, the company’s proposed energy transition is in line with the priorities of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, which according to Bloomberg, has been debating aggressive climate targets that would cut net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by mid-century, a decade before China.
“The world is entering a new energy era, which is going to be highly disruptive,” said Ambani. “The age of fossil fuels, which powered economic growth globally for nearly three centuries, cannot continue much longer. The huge quantities of carbon it has emitted into the environment have endangered life on Earth.”
In 2020, Reliance set a strict target of becoming a net-zero carbon company by 2035, 15 years less than the self-imposed cut-off many of its global peers including BP and Royal Dutch Shell had.
“We will transform our legacy business into a sustainable, circular and net-zero carbon materials business. One that will provide growing returns over several decades,” Ambani said in his speech. “And we will do this by re-purposing our existing assets to extend their economic life and earning capacity.”
India’s government plans to expand its renewable energy capacity nearly five-fold to 450 gigawatts by 2030, as the nation aims to reduce its dependence on coal.
