Energy transition: Adani Group to invest over $100 bn in a decade

Virendra Pandit

New Delhi: The Adani Group will invest over USD100 billion (Rs 83,400 crore) over the next decade in energy transition projects and manufacturing capability to produce every major component required for green energy generation, Gautam Adani, Chairman, said on Wednesday.

Besides building solar parks to produce electricity from sunlight and wind farms from wind, the Group is building significant facilities to manufacture electrolyzers for making green hydrogen, wind power turbines, and solar panels, he said.

Green hydrogen, which is made by splitting hydrogen from water with the help of electrolyzers powered by clean energy, is seen as a solution for decarbonizing industry and transportation.

Addressing the “Infrastructure – the Catalyst for India’s Future” event of Crisil, a consulting firm, Adani said energy transition and digital infrastructure are trillion-dollar opportunities that will transform India both at a local and a global scale.

“The next decade will see us invest more than USD 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 Adani Group plans to produce the “world’s least expensive green electron” which 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, Kutch (Gujarat). This single location will generate 30 gigawatts (GW) of power, thereby taking our total renewable energy capacity to 50 GW by 2030,” he said.

Adani said the energy transition space will fundamentally alter the global energy landscape forever. “The global transition market was valued at approximately USD 3 trillion in 2023 and is expected to grow to nearly USD 6 trillion by 2030, and thereafter double every 10 years till 2050.”

India, he said, aims to install 500 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030, which will require annual investments of over USD 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, and grid infrastructure development.

On digital infrastructure, Adani said data is indeed the new oil, and at the heart of all the action is the data center, 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 this depends on the ability to process data at an unprecedented speed and scale that data centers provide. However, this will need massive amounts of energy, making the data center 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.

The infrastructure required for energy transition and digital transformation is now inseparable as the technology sector becomes the largest consumer of the precious green electrons.

The Adani Group’s digital footprint will span industrial clouds across each of its businesses that it will productize and then take to market, operational technology cybersecurity offerings, super apps to leverage its B2C businesses across a wide variety of consumer-facing businesses, Artificial Intelligence laboratories to capitalize on India’s fast emerging expertise to provide AI services to the world, and Data Centres that will form the backbone of the energy-intensive digital revolution.

“It is anticipated that by 2030, the world will need 100 to 150 GW of additional green energy just for the AI data centers. We already have India’s largest order book for data centers and are now in discussions for additional gigawatt-scale green AI data centers which we are uniquely positioned to deliver,” he added.