Adani Group will invest more than $100 billion (around ₹8.34 lakh crore) in energy transition projects and manufacturing capability to produce every major component required for green energy generation, Chairman Gautam Adani said on Wednesday.
Speaking at 'Infrastructure - the Catalyst for India's Future' event of Crisil, Adani Group Chairman Gautam Adani said energy transition and digital infrastructure are trillion-dollar opportunities that will transform the country both at a local and at a global scale.
The conglomerate is building major facilities to manufacture electrolyzers for making green hydrogen, wind power turbines and solar panels, besides building solar parks.
Green hydrogen, which is made by splitting hydrogen from water with the help of electrolyzers powered by clean energy, is seen as a potential panacea for decarbonising the industry as well as transportation.
"The next decade will see us invest more than $100 billion in the energy transition space and further expand our integrated renewable energy value chain that today already spans the manufacturing of every major component required for green energy generation," he said.
The coal-to-ports group wants to produce the "world's least expensive green electron" that will become the feedstock for several sectors that must meet the sustainability mandate.
"And to make this happen, we are already building the world's largest single-site renewable energy park in Khavda, in the district of Kutch (in Gujarat). Just this single location will generate 30 GW of power, thereby taking our total renewable energy capacity to 50 GW by 2030," he said.
Impact
Adani said the energy transition space will fundamentally change the global energy landscape forever. "The global transition market was valued at approximately $3 trillion in 2023 and is expected to grow to nearly $6 trillion by 2030, and thereafter double every 10 years till 2050."
"As many of you know, our country aims to install 500 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2030. This ambitious target will require annual investments of over $150 billion.
The transition to green energy in India is expected to generate millions of new jobs in sectors such as solar and wind, energy storage, hydrogen and its derivatives, EV charging stations, as well as grid infrastructure development," he said.
On digital infrastructure, he said data is indeed the new oil, and at the heart of all the action is the data centre - the critical infrastructure needed to power all forms of computational needs, especially AI workloads for machine learning algorithms, natural language processing, computer vision, and deep learning.
“All of this is dependent on the ability to process data at an unprecedented speed and scale which are the precise capabilities that data centres provide. However, this will need massive amounts of energy, making the data centre business the largest energy consuming industry in the world,” he said.
"This makes the energy transition even more complex and is raising electricity prices, thereby adding to the already high prices because of the combined impact of climate change and demand growth," Adani said.
He added that the infrastructure required for energy transition and for digital transformation are now inseparable as the technology sector becomes the largest consumer of the precious green electrons.