On Monday, while addressing the 46th annual general meeting, Ambani unveiled the group’s renewable energy roadmap. As part of its strategy to transition from fossil fuels to new energy, RIL will expedite the development of its green energy giga manufacturing complex in Jamnagar, Gujarat.
Moreover, it will be ramping up gas production, a crucial source for clean energy. The move has the potential to help India save $7 billion annually in gas imports.
“We will be partnering with the world’s leading technology players in wind equipment manufacturing to deliver most cost-efficient solutions,” said Ambani. “One of the significant cost drivers in the manufacturing of wind blades is carbon fibre. Our foray into manufacturing carbon fibre at large scale provides a unique advantage to further integrate and reduce cost of wind turbines,” he added.
The move comes at a time when prominent industrial groups in Asia, responsible for over 50% of global carbon emissions, have announced multibillion dollar strategies to achieve their net-zero goals.
Ambani’s RIL is competing with the likes of Tata, Vedanta, Adani group and Larsen & Toubro in the race to go green and fulfil the primary sustainability criteria aimed at attracting long-term global funds.
India’s growing population and a fast-growing economy have led to a significant rise in greenhouse gas emissions in recent decades. “This has seen India become the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China and the US; in 2021, it emitted 3.9 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, accounting for roughly 7% of the global total,” said a 5 May report by Statista Inc., a New York-based data and business intelligence firm.
Along with RIL’s giga-scale manufacturing ecosystem, it will accelerate and enable installation of at least 100 gigawatt (GW) of renewable energy generation by 2030, Ambani said.
For this, RIL will leverage its decades-old gas exploration and production abilities. “We are well on our way to enhance (gas) production to 30 mmscmd (million metric standard cubic metres per day), which will be 30% of India’s gas production and 15% of its current gas demand. At a time when global energy supplies and prices are witnessing unprecedented volatility and uncertainty, gas is a major source of clean energy saving up to $7 billion per annum in imports. We are pursuing further enhancement with our exploration efforts in the Krishna-Godavari Basin with an aim to sustain gas production over 15-20 years,” said Ambani.
India’s growth has largely been fuelled by coal, the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel, which accounts for over 70% of the power mix. The second-largest contributor is agriculture, which produces massive amounts of methane from rice paddies and cattle.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas with a 100-year global warming potential or roughly 30 times that of carbon dioxide, according to Statista data.
The next few years will be “transformational” for RIL, and will help position India to be a world leader in energy transition, Ambani added. RIL will also integrate energy storage with wind and solar power generation to provide round-the-clock electricity.
“This will be followed by grid-scale deployment of batteries to convert intermittently captured photons into electrons,” said Ambani.
In the new energy space, RIL is expanding capabilities to manufacture solar, wind, batteries, hydrogen and bio-energy platforms.
As the cost of renewables will be significantly lower compared to fossil fuel-based energy, this will result in reduced energy costs and improved profitability for the oil-to-chemical business, said Ambani.
“Our concurrent priority is to set up our battery giga factory by 2026,” he said.
This will manufacture battery chemicals, cells and packs.
Alongside, RIL will fast-track commercialization of its sodium ion battery technology, said Ambani. “We will build on our technology leadership position by industrialising sodium ion cell production at megawatt level by 2025, and rapidly scale up to giga scale thereafter,” he said, adding that the group’s first priority is to deliver a fully-integrated, end-to-end solar photovoltaics (PV) manufacturing ecosystem.
“This will be one of the largest, most technologically advanced, flexible and most cost-competitive solar giga factory globally, and will be converting sand into solar PV modules,” Ambani said.
With the impact of the climate crisis looming ever closer, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set 2070 as the target year for India achieving net-zero. For this, he has committed to meeting 50% of energy demand through renewable sources and reducing the carbon intensity of the economy by more than 45% by 2030.
As the race to go green intensifies globally, RIL has doubled its investment target in green energy to ₹1.5 trillion as a part the conglomerate’s transition to “net zero”.
In 2021, Reliance had announced an investment of ₹75,000 crore in building its new energy business.
“Once proven at scale, RIL is prepared to double the investment to scale up its manufacturing ecosystem. The investment of ₹75,000 crore with a readiness to double investment will further the company’s goals related to energy transition, enhance renewable energy usage and operational eco‑efficiency, and broaden focused research for the new energy business,” said RIL in its latest annual report.
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Updated: 29 Aug 2023, 12:35 AM IST
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