Green energy to pip other RIL verticals in 5-7 years: Ambani – Times of India

Mumbai: Reliance Industries’s (RIL’s) green energy business, which will go live in 12 months, will outshine all its existing growth engines in just five-to-seven years, said its chairman and MD Mukesh Ambani.
In his address to RIL shareholders in the FY22 report, Ambani said, “Over the next 12 months, our investments across the green energy value chain will gradually start going live, scaling up over the next couple of years. This new growth engine holds great promise to outshine all our existing growth engines in just 5-7 years.” RIL launched the green energy business in FY22 with a capex commitment of $10 billion over three years.
“Affordability is the most critical factor in the adoption of any new technology and the scale of societal benefit it can create. Reliance has embarked on this journey with a vision to repeat the feat it achieved in wireless broadband,” said Ambani.
Reliance had disrupted the telecom market by launching free voice calls and extremely cheap data plans. Its telecom brand Jio is the largest player in the country with a subscriber count of 420 million. “Just as India has the world’s most affordable wireless broadband today, we will have the world’s most affordable green energy within this decade,” said Ambani.
Towards this, Reliance is developing end-to-end green energy solutions (from solar power generation to production of green hydrogen and their distribution), which will make “clean energy available to everyone at the most affordable price”. For this, it has entered into a series of partnerships, including equity investments, with local and international corporates in FY22. It bought Norwegian-headquartered solar panel maker REC Solar, acquired 40% stake in Sterling & Wilson Renewable Energy, and joined hands with US-based Chart Industries for hydrogen technology, among other deals.
While RIL will keep ramping up its green energy play, it will also continue to expand its existing businesses (Jio, retail, oil-to-chemicals) to newer frontiers of technology, innovation, scale and execution. Ambani said that Reliance’s diversification across digital services, retail and energy & materials businesses as well as its unparalleled level of agility in each of these segments helps in weathering storms like inflation and volatile energy and commodity prices. Besides these, Reliance’s global scale of operations along with its ever-expanding balance sheet that is extremely light on debt also helps in overcoming many hurdles, the CMD said.