Reliance Industries to set up four Gigafactories in India

At their recently held annual general meeting, Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) announced the company’s plan to make an investment of ₹60,000 crore in renewable energy production. The corporation will set foot into the clean energy space and has planned to build four gigafactories and solar plants which will help India in the run to shift to renewable energy resources. This will also be a step towards the 15-year commitment to become net carbon zero by 2035, which the company announced last year.

Reliance Industries plans to set up four facilities which will be intended to manufacture and integrate all critical components of the renewable energy ecosystem. These will include an integrated solar photovoltaic gigafactory for the production of solar energy, an advanced energy storage gigafactory for the storage of intermittent energy, an electrolyser gigafactory for the production of green hydrogen, and a fuel cell gigafactory for converting hydrogen into motive and stationary power.

"We will invest an additional ₹15,000 crores in the value chain, partnerships, and future technologies, including upstream and downstream industries. Thus, our overall investment in the new energy business will be ₹75,000 crores in three years," said Ambani. In addition to this they also have plans to set up solar power plants with an aim of generating 100 GW of solar energy by 2030. The company will be exploring advanced electrochemical technologies that can be used for large-scale grid batteries to store energy. These batteries will be produced at the advanced energy storage gigafactory.

Ambani made three affirmations in the announcement. “First, as one of the biggest energy markets in the world, India will play a leading role in transforming the global energy landscape. Second, as a company always focused on growing businesses of the future, Reliance will provide leadership on the combined strength of our balance-sheet, talent, technology and proven project execution capabilities. Third, Reliance will make its New Energy business a truly global business," he said.

The first Integrated Solar Photovoltaic gigafactory will create solar energy. “We will start with raw silica and convert this to poly silicon which we will then convert to ingot and wafers. These wafers would be used to make high efficiency solar cells and finally assembled into solar modules of highest quality and durability. “We will target to achieve costs that are lowest in the world to ensure affordability of our solar modules. We are highly inspired by the goal set by our Prime Minister Narendra Modiji to achieve 450GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030,” Ambani said.

The project will be spread across 5000 acres in the city of Jamnagar in Gujarat. It will be called the Dhirubhai Ambani green energy giga complex and is scheduled to be completed by the year 2030. “It will be amongst the largest such integrated renewable energy manufacturing facilities in the world,” said Ambani, a statement that is surely bound to prick up Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s ears.

These plans of building gigafactories in India is a huge step to make renewable energy available and accessible across the country. The ICE vehicle shift is going to happen and our country needs the infrastructure to back up vehicles which will soon be powered by either hydrogen or electricity.