Mukesh Ambani eyes a 75k crore green future for Reliance

Mukesh Ambani eyes a 75k crore green future for Reliance

Subject : Economy

Context : Reliance Industries has laid out an ambitious plan worth Rs 75,000 crore to pivot towards green energy as its chief Mukesh Ambani announced that the company will look to cut down its carbon footprint to nil by 2035 and join in the efforts to bridge the green energy divide “in India and globally.

Concept :

• Talking up a total investment of over Rs 60,000 crore in the next 3 years, Ambani said that the first part of the plan is to build “Four Giga Factories” that will “manufacture and fully integrate all the critical components of the new energy ecosystem”.
• The four component factories will comprise “an integrated solar photovoltaic module factory” for the production of solar energy while “an advanced energy storage battery factory” will be set up for the storage of intermittent energy.
• An electrolyser factory will come up for the production of green hydrogen and, “for converting hydrogen into motive and stationary power”, a fuel cell factory, too, is in the works.

Working of a gigafactory

• Gigafactory, a giant operation that first took shape in the Nevada desert, is a massive battery factory, a part of the plan to help transition of the world onto renewable sources.
• Tesla CEO Elon Musk is the founder of Giga factory who is believed to have first coined the term “Gigafactory” in November 2013, and the word comes from the prefix “giga” which is used to denote a measurement that’s been multiplied by one billion.
• The gigafactory is intended to gradually provide cradle-to-cradle handling of batteries, from raw material over components to finished products, and recycling old batteries into new.
• Cells constitute most of the value creation, whereas packing and electronics are minor parts. More engineers are assigned to developing production equipment than to developing products.