The Adani Group will invest more $100 billion in the next decade with a substantial amount going for energy transition, said group chairman Gautam Adani on Tuesday, announcing “game-changing” plans that the billionaire claimed could make India a net-energy exporter.
The group has earmarked 70 per cent of its new investments for energy transition space and infrastructure. “We are already the world’s largest solar player, and we intend to do far more. In this context, Adani New Industries is the manifestation of the bet we are making in the energy transition space. It is our commitment to invest $70 billion in an integrated Hydrogen-based value chain,” Adani said at the Forbes Global CEO conference in Singapore.
“In addition to our existing 20 GW renewables portfolio, the new business will be augmented by another 45 GW of hybrid renewable power generation spread over 100,000 hectares—an area 1.4 times that of Singapore. This will lead to commercialization of three million metric tons of green hydrogen.” This business will see Adani group building three giga factories for manufacturing solar modules, wind turbines, and hydrogen electrolyzers in India.
“We are in the process of building a 10 GW silicon-based photo-voltaic value-chain that will be backward-integrated from raw silicon to solar panels, a 10 GW integrated wind-turbine manufacturing facility, and a 5 GW Hydrogen electrolyser factory,” he said.
“Today, we can confidently state that we have a line of sight to first become one of the least expensive producers of the green electron and thereafter the least expensive producer of green hydrogen. It is an absolute game changer for India and opens up the unprecedented possibility that India could one day become a net energy exporter,” he said.
Adani said while it undertakes this energy transition, it is also making sure that the group’s goals stay match national needs. “Critics would have us instantly get rid of all fossil fuel sources that India needs to serve its large population. This would not work for India. Even today, India with 16 percent of the world’s population accounts for less than 7 percent of CO2 emissions and this ratio continues to fall,” he said.
On the group’s plans for digital transformation, Adani said the sector is witnessing explosive growth in India. “This sector consumes more energy than any other industry in the world and therefore our move to build green data centers is a game-changing differentiator. We will interconnect these data centers through a series of terrestrial and globally linked undersea cables drawn at our ports and build consumer-based super-apps that will bring the hundreds of millions of Adani’s B2C consumers on one common digital platform.
“Once done, the monetization possibilities are endless. We also just finished building the world’s largest sustainability cloud that already has a hundred of our solar and wind sites running on it – all off a single giant command and control centre that will soon be augmented by a global A-I lab. These are just a few of the adjacencies that are being mainstreamed at our digital businesses at Adani.”
