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Reliance Industries Ltd said it will invest ₹75,000 crore by 2024 to build a green energy giga complex in Jamnagar in a three-pronged plan, aiming to be amongst the largest integrated renewable energy manufacturing facilities in the world.
“Jamnagar was the cradle of our old energy business. Jamnagar will also be the cradle of our new energy business,” Chairman Mukesh Ambani said at the 44 th annual general meeting (AGM) of the company on Thursday.
New energy ecosystem
The first part of the plan is to build four giga factories that will manufacture and fully integrate all the critical components of the new energy ecosystem. This will include an integrated solar photovoltaic module factory, an advanced energy storage battery factory, an electrolyser factory for producing green hydrogen and a fuel cell factory for converting hydrogen into motive and stationary power with an investment of over ₹60,000 crore.
Reliance will set up at least 100 GW of solar energy by 2030. A significant part of this will come from rooftop solar and decentralised solar installations in villages.
Gears, critical machinery
The second part of the plan seeks to provide infrastructure and utilities to manufacture ancillary material and equipment needed to support the giga factories to ensure all critical materials are available on time.
“We will invest an additional ₹15,000 crore in value chain, partnerships and future technologies, including upstream and downstream industries. Thus, our overall initial investment from our own internal resources in the new energy business will be ₹75,000 (over $10 billion) crore in three years,” Ambani added.
Reliance will also support independent manufacturers with right capabilities to be part of the nationwide eco-system.
Funding plans
The third part of the plan involves re-purposing the firm’s engineering, project management and construction capabilities, combined with physical and digital technologies to offer renewable energy solutions. Reliance will build two new dedicated units — a renewable energy project management and construction division and a renewable energy project finance division — to further strengthen the ecosystem.
The renewable energy project finance division will provide finance solutions to the stakeholders by enabling a platform to source long-term global capital for these investments at the most attractive terms. “I envision a future when our country will be transformed from a large importer of fossil energy to a large exporter of clean solar energy solutions,” Ambani said.
Carbon fibre plant
Reliance will also invest in India’s first carbon fibre plant for supporting hydrogen and solar ecosystems as part of a vision for new materials and green chemicals.
It will commercialise with global partners the Multi-zone Catalytic Cracking (MCC) technology to optimise the fossil fuel transition to sustainable chemical and material building blocks.
“Thus, we will transform our legacy business into sustainable, circular and net zero carbon materials business, that will provide growing returns over several decades. And, we will do this by repurposing our existing assets to extend their economic life and earning capacity. In doing so, we will have no legacy asset write-downs in the coming years,” Ambani added.
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