Reliance Industries.
Anant Ambani leads Reliance's clean-energy business. By our estimate, one of his projects alone could cut about 29 million tons of CO2 a year.
Anant Ambani works in oil. His big bet is on sunshine.
Reliance Industries controls the world's largest oil-refining complex. But Anant Ambani, who is leading the clean-energy business, wants to focus on something different from what has been already established.
Anant Ambani is executive director of Reliance Industries. And since 2022, he has been working on new-energy businesses like solar power, batteries and green hydrogen.
His main goal is to achieve Net-zero carbon by 2035.
He summed up his whole idea and put it under one line at Reliance's annual meeting in June 2026:
"The world built its old energy on Middle Eastern oil. Now, the world will build its new energy on Indian sunshine."
The sunshine looks like this in actual numbers.
A bigger part of Reliance's clean-energy plans are happening in Kutch, Gujarat.
The Reliance's renewable-energy hub expands over 550,000 acres. This is almost 2,200 square kilometres bigger than London's 1,572.
The objective is to achieve more than 40 billion units of electricity a year. It is almost 3% of all the power India uses, and all of this happening from one site, the power site of Kutch.
The site just doesn't sleep at all because massive batteries store the power and provide needed power supply after the sunset. Kutch is one single piece of a bigger goal, the goal of producing 100 gigawatts (GW) of clean power by 2030.
That power can potentially reduce about 29 million tonnes of CO2 a year, the amount is equivalent of what 6.8 million cars would produce.
There is a reason why this matters for the planet. According to the data provided by Central Electricity Authority, India's electricity grid released around 0.727 tonnes of CO2 for every 1,000 units of electricity in 2023-24.
If 40 billion units of electricity were to be produced through renewable sources and displaced equivalent grid electricity, you get 29 million tonnes of CO2 avoided each year.
Imagine your car in the driveway now imagine 6.8 million cars. That's how many cars it takes to put out that much CO2 in a year.
Another important aspect of this change is that 29 million tonnes is about three-quarters of Reliance's own reported emissions. One project could minimize most of them.
Our estimate, based on the published output target and official grid data.
The plan is beyond solar panels
Anant is not only just building power plants. He's building the machines that make them. The manufacturing procedure is taking place at a 5,000-acre green-energy complex in Jamnagar.
|
What he's building |
How big |
Where it stands |
|
Solar panel factory |
20 GW of panels a year |
Nearly 1 GW made so far, including India's first certified heterojunction (HJT) panels, a newer type that wears out more slowly |
|
Battery factory |
40 GWh, growing to 120 GWh |
First phase due in 2026 |
|
Green hydrogen and green chemicals |
3 million tonnes of capacity |
10-year goal. A $3 billion green ammonia deal with Samsung C&T is already signed |
|
The whole green-energy complex |
Rs 75,000 crore (about $10 billion) |
Announced in 2021 |
The impact of this project is not just limited to carbon, the project is estimated to create around 200,000 jobs.
The clean-energy plans are only one part of Anant's bigger environmental work.
Anant founded Vantara, which covers almost 3,500 acres near Jamnagar. More than almost 10 million trees are there.
It is situated inside a dense forest belt. Reports say that this greenery has greatly impacted the environment of this area. Cooled down the temperature, and brought better rainfall.
So how much carbon can those trees pull out of the air? Nobody has published an official figure. So we ran one.
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization says young tropical forests take away 3.2 to 10 tonnes of carbon per hectare each year and Vantara covers about 1,416 hectares.
If we do the math then the figure is around 17,000 to 52,000 tonnes of CO2 a year vanished out by Vantara alone
Our estimate, based on FAO rates and US EPA car data.
Anant speaks about his mission
"Conservation and sustainability need to become the next great movement. one that goes beyond nations, generations and differences."
The next nine years will show how far the sunshine plan can go.
Anant Ambani works for the company behind the world's largest oil refinery. He's using that position to build one of the biggest clean-energy projects on Earth.
The old energy came from oil. If he succeeds in these marks, the new energy will come from Indian sunshine. And millions of tonnes of carbon will never reach the sky resulting in a better future.
