Adani, which entered renewable energy in 2015 by forming Adani Green Energy, is now the country’s largest green power producer. Through Adani New Industries Ltd (ANIL), it is also a top producer of solar cells, modules and wind turbine generators. The new energy businesses earned about ₹25,000 crore for the Ahmedabad-based conglomerate in FY25.
Meanwhile, it was at Reliance Industries Ltd’s (RIL) annual general meeting (AGM) in 2020 that Ambani declared his ambition to make the conglomerate a world leader in new energy and new materials in 15 years. Gujarat’s Jamnagar, which hosts its sprawling oil refinery, would become the cradle of its new energy business too, he had said.
However, progress has been slower. Of the 330-odd subsidiaries of Reliance Industries, as listed on its website, about four dozen are engaged in new energy. But revenues from these businesses are minuscule on RIL’s ₹10-trillion annual income statement.As Ambani takes the stage at yet another RIL AGM on Friday, investors will be keen for an update.
At both, the green businesses are led by the promoter family’s next generation. Sagar Adani, the nephew of Gautam, is an executive director at Adani Green Energy, while Mukesh’s youngest son Anant Ambani is an executive director on the board of RIL focusing on new energy and materials.
Emails sent to Reliance and the Adani Group on Tuesday requesting comment remained unanswered.
Delayed timelines
Ambani had said at the AGM in 2022 that by the following year, RIL would start making battery packs and scale up the operations to a fully integrated 5 GWh per annum capacity by 2024. However, at the 2024 AGM, Ambani said production would start by the latter half of 2025. The plant is yet to become operational.
At the 2022 AGM, Ambani had also set a target of 20 GW of solar capacity by 2025, a target it is set to miss. It commissioned the first line module production line of a 10-GW solar cell facility at Jamnagar earlier this year, a few months behind its 2024 target. Two more of the three planned lines are yet to be commissioned.
In a 5 June note, analysts at international brokerage firm Jefferies posed questions to the RIL management on the progress in solar and battery giga-factories, and on the investment required to replace fossil-fuel based electricity with captive solar power. They also said the share of fossil fuels could decline if the share of renewables rises, as companies transition to a low-carbon future.
In 2021, RIL had announced an investment of ₹75,000 crore for its clean energy transition.
“Relative to the past three years, the capex pace picked up in FY2025. However, the overall progress seems to be slower than the initial plans,” Kotak analysts Anil Sharma, Keshav Soni, Garima Mishra, Sumangal Nevatia and Sandeep Gupta wrote in a note dated 24 August.
End-to-end play
Both groups have charted an end-to-end play in renewable energy to capture maximum value and eliminate supply chain risk, planning to manufacture solar cells and modules at gigawatt scale. The Adani Group has 4 GW per annum of solar cell capacity at Mundra which it operationalized April 2024.
Eventually, both aim to begin making solar wafers and ingots, and subsequently polysilicon, to capture the entire value chain of solar cells. They also plan to install solar modules and wind turbines to generate clean electricity at gigawatt scale. Adani plans to set up 50 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030. Reliance’s ambition is twice that-100 GW.
“Our complete ownership and automation of the integrated value chains will allow us to maximize margins that are higher than those of stand-alone, non-integrated players,” Ambani said at the company’s AGM last year.
Adani Green Energy has so far operationalized just under 16 GW of renewable energy capacity through solar and wind projects. Reliance has provided no update on this front yet. However, it has secured land at Kutch in Gujarat, for generating renewable energy. Notably, the Adani Group is setting up a 30-GW renewable energy farm at Khavda in Kutch, touted to be the largest in the world.
Power storage
The two groups have also made divergent bets on storing renewable power.
The Adani Group is primarily betting on pumped hydro storage plants through Adani Green Energy, with a target of 5 GW of storage capacity by 2030. It also has plans of setting up battery energy storage systems (BESS), although it has no plans of making batteries in-house.
The Reliance group, meanwhile, is betting heavily on BESS. It is constructing a 30-GW-hour annual capacity battery cell manufacturing plant at Jamnagar.
Between December 2021 and March 2022, Reliance made two key acquisitions — It purchased UK-based sodium-ion battery firm Faradion Ltd for $130 million and a Chinese battery maker Lithium Werks for $61 million. However, four years later, RIL’s battery project has not commenced yet.
A look at the financials of Faradion suggests its operations have taken a severe hit. In 2024, its revenue fell 92% to under ₹1 crore. Its German unit also saw a 14% decline in revenue to just under ₹4 crore in the nine months ended 31 December, 2024. Faradion’s business is struggling owing to challenges in commercialization of its technology which is not in mainstream use yet.
Meanwhile, Lithium Werks specializes in making lithium-ion power cells, which are good for use cases where high bursts of power are required for a very low duration. These cannot be used in solar business as they require energy cells which are able to store power for a longer duration.
Green hydrogen and more
Using the clean energy they generate, the two groups plan to make green hydrogen through electrolysis, which will then be shipped from their ports at Jamnagar and Mundra, respectively. Both have been shortlisted for receiving government incentives to set up electrolyzer manufacturing plants. While RIL expects its multi-gigawatt electrolyzer manufacturing plant to be operational by 2026, the Adani Group has not shared any update on this front.
The clean energy will also power data centres. Both groups have gigawatt-scale ambitions here as well. The Adani Group has just about 37 MW of capacity operational across Chennai, Noida and Hyderabad and has a visibility for scaling this to 210 MW . The data centre business of Reliance Industries is yet to take off.
While both conglomerates have grand plans, Adani had a headstart in the new energy ecosystem, having entered the space a decade ago in 2015 when it set up Adani Green Energy.
