Moving away from polluting coal, billionaire Gautam Adani on Wednesday laid out a blueprint to make his group the world's largest solar power company by 2025 and the biggest renewable energy firm by 2030 through aggressive capacity addition push in these areas.
The USD 15-billion Adani Group -- a sprawling conglomerate with interests in energy, agri-business, real estate and defence, among others -- plans to double its renewable power generating capacity of current 2.5 gigawatts (GW) by 2020 and further to 18 GW by 2025, Adani wrote in a Linkedin post.
"Our vision is to become the world's largest solar power company by 2025 and largest renewable power company by 2030," the Adani Group chairman wrote.
Adani Group not just owns coal-fired power plants but also coal mines in India and Australia. It has invested big time in coal as the Adani empire of mines, cargo ships, ports and power plants depend heavily on it.
He said the Adani Group has moved quickly into a position to lead the clean energy transformation taking place not just in India but on the global stage that will see the group building one of the largest integrated energy portfolios.
"In 2019, we were ranked as the 6th largest solar player globally and as a part of this journey, we are well within reach to be India's largest renewable energy company by 2020 and one of the top three global solar energy companies by 2021.
"Our existing portfolio of renewable power generating assets stands today at over 2.5 GW. This is expected to more than double by 2020, with the implementation of 2.9 GW under construction capacity and further record three-fold growth touching 18 GW by 2025," he said.
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Adani Group, he said, has committed to investing over 70 per cent of its budgeted capex of the energy vertical into clean energy and energy-efficient systems.
"Another key project that has begun taking shape as part of this journey, is the expansion of our 1.3 GW state-of-the-art solar cell and module manufacturing plant in Mundra (in Gujrat) which will turn into a 3.5 GW manufacturing facility," he said adding the group was also in discussions on ventures to enable the world's only 100 per cent green energy-based chemical manufacturing and data centre facilities.
Globally, coal is in steep decline particularly in Western Europe because of competition from those alternative energy sources. But in Asia, demand for coal, the main source of energy, is growing.
In India too, the coal makes up for nearly 60 per cent of the energy usage due to its affordability. But this is changing with the government push to move away from coal to cleaner natural gas and renewable energy sources.
"The age of renewable energy has dawned upon the world faster than most could have anticipated," Adani wrote. "India has been the founder member that initiated the Global Solar Alliance constituted of 122 countries, and over the past few years, our nation has shown the greatest intent taking some of the most concrete actions for the world to look at it as one of the main the beacons of hope for managing the challenge of climate change."
He said a majority of India's COP 21 climate change goals set for 2030 are expected to be achieved almost a decade earlier. "Prime Minister Narendra Modi's announcement at the 2019 UN conference to further raise India's share of non-fossil fuel mix to 450 GW is easily one of the most ambitious global commitments ever made by any nation. We must all be proud of this."