Change they say is the only constant. The first-generation entrepreneur, Gautam Adani, has always had his eyes set on exploring and expanding – from the time he dropped out of college to go to Mumbai and begin working as a diamond trader.
A person who started his life from a regular chawl and overtook Bill Gates and Warren Buffet in wealth before Hindenburg happened, Gautam Adani is the world’s busiest dealmaker. He started as a regular diamond trader. Over the course of the past three decades, the Adani Group has developed assets that span key established and emerging sectors of the Indian economy: ports, airports, logistics, road, rail, water, defence and aerospace, solar, wind and hybrid energy, power generation, transmission and distribution, LNG and PNG terminals, city gas and piped gas distribution, food FMCG, data centres, digital services, undersea cables, industry cloud and super app, AI labs, mining, metals, minerals, cement, petrochemicals, and media.
With his hard work and passion, his Group is now the infrastructure behemoth. Born in a smalltown, today international leaders invite him to set up industries in their country. Large, reputed, international players like Wilmar, DP World and Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) have partnered with and invested in the Group’s businesses, demonstrating their trust in the Group and its strong governance framework.
It is his farsightedness and willingness to take risks that he starts work on an idea and sees it through to fruition.When the world was grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic, he was working on another of his ideas –data centres. The data centre business got a boost during the pandemic after getting an unexpected tailwind.
The internet economy saw an unprecedented surge in India, leading to an increasing need to build requisite data centre to ensure seamless uninterrupted data consumption and storage.
The growing smartphone subscribers with rising monthly mobile data traffic, coupled with rising broadband penetration and increasing digital transactions has created an enormous need to collect, store, process and distribute data.
Adani Enterprises Limited (AEL) joined hands with EdgeConneX to set up data centres across the country. AdaniConneX, a 50:50 joint venture between the two,aims to empower digital India with a 1 GW capacity of hyperscale to hyperlocal data centre solutions over the next decade. The plan is to build data centres in Chennai, Hyderabad, Noida, Pune, Mumbai and Bengaluru. Chennai 1 is a 33–MW capacity centre, of which 17 MW is complete and live, and 16 MW is under construction. The Hyderabad plant is proposed to be a 96 MW centre and is under construction and so is the Noida centre, which is proposed to be a 100-MW plant.
The Adani Group is committed to sustainably managing its ESG footprint by accelerating energy efficiency measures and embedding circular economy principles. This is enabled by innovation in energy efficiency and storage while also leveraging its global expertise in leading renewable energy platforms and emerging green hydrogen capabilities.
Data centres consume massive amounts of energy, making them a significant emission source. However, these emissions can be mitigated by adopting renewable energy sources, such as green hydrogen and solar power. AdaniConneX promotes 24×7 carbon-free energy in the region. The integrated combination of solar, wind, battery storage, and pump-hydro energy storage delivers dispatchable and reliable clean energy. This also helps mitigate the variability associated with intermittent sources, i.e., solar and wind.
The Adani Group is investing heavily in renewable energies, increasing its solar capacity and improving its wind-generated power capabilities to such an extent that it expects to be the world’s largest renewable power-generating company by 2030. In his keynote address at the TiE Sustainability Summit in 2021, he noted how a hydrogen-driven revolution can transform India, green India and energize India at a price point lower than what we pay today.
Presently, the cost of renewable energy is at less than Rs 2.50 per unit (KWh) and the Group believes it can bring it down to help produce low-cost hydrogen. It plans to invest up to $50 billion over the next 10 years to set up a fully integrated green hydrogen ecosystem in India. This includes the production of 1 million tonnes of green hydrogen in the initial phase which will be ramped up to 3 million tonnes later. Earlier, the Group planned to do it in partnership with TotalEnergies SE, which pulled out of the project. However, Adani is going ahead with the plan as scheduled.
Adani New Industries Limited (ANIL), part of AEL, is building the green hydrogen project. Adani already is the largest renewable energy producer and for the green hydrogen project, it plans to expand its solar module manufacturing capabilities at Mundra SEZ in Gujarat to up to 10 GW per annum. The Mundra plantwill produce metallurgical grade (mg) silicon, polysilicon, ingots, wafers, cells and the module that are used to generate power from solar energy. Sea water will be desalinated before using its electrolyzers to produce low-cost green hydrogen.
The Group is competitively placed with some key advantages like building adjacencies, complete ownership of large land parcels across the country, project management capabilities and availability of resources.