Reliance to build 100 gigawatts of renewable energy projects
Mukesh Ambani’s group aims to be net carbon zero by 2035
The conglomerate led by Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man, announced plans to invest $76 billion toward clean energy projects, dwarfing an earlier commitment of $10 billion by the world’s biggest fossil-fuel billionaire.
Reliance Industries Ltd., controlled by Ambani, has signed pacts with the state government of Gujarat for a total investment of 5.96 trillion rupees ($81 billion), according to an exchange filing Thursday. Of this, about 5 trillion rupees would be used over the next 15 years to build 100 gigawatts of renewable power projects and a green hydrogen network while 600 billion rupees will be for factories making solar modules, hydrogen electrolyzers, fuel cells and storage batteries, the filing said.
The remaining sum is to be spent in the retail-to-refining group’s new and existing projects, including the upgrade of its telecom network for 5G services and expansion of its consumer retail businesses. Reliance has already “started the process of scouting land” for its renewable energy power projects and has requested the Gujarat administration for 450,000 acres (182,110 hectares) in the arid Kutch region.
Though the investment pact is just a memorandum of understanding right now, it outlines the scope of Ambani’s green ambitions and is a big step up from the $10 billion investment over three years he had announced in June. Ambani is in the midst of transforming his fossil fuel-fed empire and pivoting it toward green energy and digital technology.
Ambitious Target
These projects will also boost Reliance’s target to make its operations carbon neutral by 2035 – an ambitious target for a company that derived 60% of its revenue from oil refining and petrochemicals.
The announcement follows billionaire Gautam Adani-led conglomerate’s pact with South Korean steel giant Posco to explore business opportunities in India, including setting up a green steel mill in Gujarat, with a potential investment of $5 billion. Adani has committed to invest a total of $70 billion by 2030 across its green energy value chain.
Both the billionaires and their ability to walk the talk on their green energy commitments are crucial if the Narendra Modi-led government has to achieve its target of making the country net carbon zero by 2070.
Like their global peers, Reliance and Adani groups, who made their fortunes from fossil fuels, are now aggressively expanding their clean energy footprint amid mounting pressure to join the fight against climate change.
The climate emergency is the biggest threat to civilisation we have ever faced. But there is good news: we already have every tool we need to beat it. The challenge is not identifying the solutions, but rolling them out with great speed.
Some key sectors are already racing ahead, such as electric cars. They are already cheaper to own and run in many places – and when the purchase prices equal those of fossil-fueled vehicles in the next few years, a runaway tipping point will be reached.
Electricity from renewables is now the cheapest form of power in most places, sometimes even cheaper than continuing to run existing coal plants. There’s a long way to go to meet the world’s huge energy demand, but the plummeting costs of batteries and other storage technologies bodes well.
And many big companies are realising that a failure to invest will be far more expensive as the impacts of global heating destroy economies. Even some of the biggest polluters, such as cement and steel, have seen the green writing on the wall.
Buildings are big emitters but the solution – improved energy efficiency – is simple to achieve and saves the occupants money, particularly with the cost of installing technology such as heat pumps expected to fall.
Stopping the razing of forests requires no technology at all, but it does require government action. While progress is poor – and Bolsonaro’s Brazil is going backwards – countries such as Indonesia have shown regulatory action can be effective. Protecting and restoring forests, particularly by empowering indigenous people, is a potent tool.
Recognition of the role food and farming play in driving global heating is high, and the solutions, from alternatives to meat to regenerative farming, are starting to grow. As with fossil fuels, ending vast and harmful subsidies is key, and there are glimmers of hope here, too.
In the climate crisis, every fraction of a degree matters and so every action reduces people’s suffering. Every action makes the world a cleaner and better place to live – by, for example, cutting the air pollution that ends millions of lives a year.
The real fuel for the green transition is a combination of those most valuable and intangible of commodities: political will and skill. The supply is being increased by demands for action from youth strikers to chief executives, and must be used to face down powerful vested interests, such as the fossil fuel, aviation and cattle industries. The race for a sustainable, low-carbon future is on, and the upcoming Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow will show how much faster we need to go.
Transport
Responsible for 14-28% of global greenhouse gas emissions, transport has been slow to decarbonise, and faces particular challenges in areas such as long-haul flight.
But technical solutions are available, if the will, public policy and spending are there, too. Electric cars are the most obvious: petrol and diesel vehicles will barely be produced in Europe within the decade. EV sales are accelerating everywhere, with the likes of Norway well past the tipping point, and cheaper electric vehicles coming from China have cut the fumes from buses. Meanwhile, combustion engines are ever more efficient and less polluting.
Employees on the assembly line for electric buses in Xi an, Shaanxi province, China. Photograph: Visual China Group/Getty Images
Bike and scooter schemes are growing rapidly as cities around the world embrace electric micromobility. Far cleaner ships for global freight are coming. The potential of hydrogen is growing, for cleaner trains where electrification is impractical, to be followed by ships and even, one day, planes. Manufacturers expect short-haul electric aircraft much sooner. Most of all, the pandemic has shown that a world without hypermobility is possible – and that many people will accept, or even embrace, a life where they commute and travel less. Gwyn Topham
Deforestation
Deforestation and land use change are the second-largest source of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. The destruction of the world’s forests has continued at a relentless pace during the pandemic, with millions of hectares lost, driven by land-clearing in the Brazilian Amazon.
Volunteers plant mangrove tree seedlings in a conservation area on Dupa beach, Indonesia. Photograph: Basri Marzuki/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock
But there are reasons for hope. The UK has put nature at the heart of its Cop26 presidency and behind the scenes, the government is pushing hard for finance and new commitments from forested nations to protect the world’s remaining carbon banks. Indonesia and Malaysia, once global hotspots of deforestation, have experienced significant falls in recent years, the result of increased restrictions on palm oil plantations. However, the 2000s soy moratorium in Brazil shows these trends are reversible. Finally, there is a growing recognition of the importance of indigenous communities to protecting the world’s forests and biodiversity. In the face of racism and targeted violence, a growing number of studies and reports show they are the best guardians of the forest. Empowering those communities will be vital to ending deforestation. Patrick Greenfield
Technology
Emissions from technology companies, including direct emissions, emissions from electricity use and other operations such as manufacturing, account for 0.3% of global carbon emissions, while emissions from cryptocurrencies is a huge emerging issue.
Mining – the process in which a bitcoin is awarded to a computer that solves a complex series of algorithms – is a deeply energy-intensive process and only gets more energy-intensive as the algorithms grow more complex. But new mining methods are lighter, environmentally. A system called “proof of stake” has a 99% lower carbon footprint.
Researchers pose for a group photo at the International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals in Beijing, China. The centre was inaugurated to support the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Photograph: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock
Scrutiny of the whole sector is increasing, spearheaded by tech workers who walked out in their hundreds to join climate change marches in 2019. The companies have pledged to do better: Amazon aims to be net zero carbon by 2040 and powered with 100% renewable energy by 2025. Facebook has a target of net zero emissions for its entire supply chain by 2030 and Microsoft has pledged to become carbon negative by 2030. Apple has committed to become carbon-neutral across its whole supply chain by 2030.
They’re still falling short when it comes to delivering, but employee groups continue to push. Kari Paul
Business
For decades Exxon Mobil has arguably been corporate America’s biggest climate change denier. But this year, the activist investor Engine No 1 won three seats on the company’s board with an agenda to force the company to finally acknowledge and confront the climate crisis.
Across corporate America and all around the world there are signs of change. The Federal Reserve, the world’s most powerful central bank, is beefing up its climate team. BlackRock, the world’s biggest investor, has made environmental sustainability a core goal for the company.
This isn’t about ideology: it’s about “common sense.” According to BlackRock, failure to tackle climate change is simply bad for business. The investor calculates that 58% of the US will suffer economic decline by 2060-2080 if nothing is done.
Much more needs to be done, and some question whether corporate America can really solve this crisis without government action. But the days of denial are over – what matters now is action. Dom Rushe
Electricity
The rocketing global market price for gas has ripped through world economies, forcing factories to close, triggering blackouts in China, and threatening to cool the global economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.
But it has also spelled out a clear economic case for governments to redouble their efforts in developing homegrown, low-carbon electricity systems.
The good news is that renewable energy is ready to step up and play a greater role in electricity systems across the globe.
A woman completes paperwork by the light of solar-powered lamps in a village shop for solar products. Photograph: Kunal Gupta/Climate Visuals Countdown
The precipitous fall in the price of wind and solar energy has helped to incentivise fresh investments in electricity vehicles and energy storage technologies, such as batteries, where costs are plummeting too. Soon, wind and solar power will help to produce green hydrogen, which can be stored over long periods of time to generate electricity during days that are a little less bright or breezy.
All of these advances are made possible by cheap renewables, and will help countries to use more renewable energy too. There has never been a better time to step back from gas and go green. Jillian Ambrose
Buildings
The built environment is one of our biggest polluters, responsible for about 40% of global carbon emissions.
Over the past two decades, the carbon footprint of buildings “in use” has been greatly reduced by energy-saving technologies – better insulation, triple-glazing, and on-site renewables such as solar panels and ground-source heat pumps. Onheat pumps, the UK lags far behind: Norway, through a mixture of grants and high electricity prices, has installed more than 600 heat pumps for every 1,000 households.
As national energy grids are decarbonising, the focus is shifting to reducing the “embodied energy” of materials – which can account for up to three-quarters of a building’s emissions over its lifespan – for example by reducing the amount of concrete and steel in favour of timber.
The Vertical Forest in the Porta Nuova district in Milan. Photograph: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty
There is also a growing movement to prioritise refurbishment and reuse over demolition, driven by the realisation that the most sustainable buildings are the ones that already exist. Oliver Wainwright
Food and farming
The hoofprint of the global livestock industry is a significant one, accounting for about 14% of total annual greenhouse gas emissions. But it is increasingly recognised and accepted by national governments.
New Zealand now has a legal commitment to reduce methane emissions from agriculture by 10% by 2030, while Denmark has passed a legally binding target to reduce climate emissions from the agricultural sector by 55% by 2030.
While global meat production is increasing, there is a growing shift towards fish and poultry, which have a comparatively lower emissions footprint than red meats. The food industry is also developing a range of lower-carbon products using plant-based proteins such as soy and pea, and insect and lab-grown meat alternatives. Tom Levitt
Manufacturing
Decarbonising the manufacturing of every product needed by a modern economy is a vast and varied task. Some sectors are well on their way. For instance, Apple, the world’s third-largest maker of mobile phones by volume, has pledged to produce net zero carbon throughout its supply chain by 2030.
For many others, advances in efficiency of factories and their products will be accelerated by machine learning and other artificial intelligence technologies that are still in their infancy. There are even hopeful signs in some of the hardest sectors to decarbonise, such as plans by Volvo to replace coal with hydrogen in the steel it uses in cars.
One of the greatest reasons for optimism is manufacturers’ increasing awareness of circular design principles. Making products easier to recycle from the start will help to cut emissions from fresh resource extraction– although a bigger question remains as to whether rich societies can reduce consumption, the most obvious way to cut emissions. Jasper Jolly
The big worry for most people thinking about buying an electric car is how to charge the thing.
But the real question you should be asking is how you’re going to refuel your petrol or diesel vehicle if you don’t go electric.
That’s because electric cars are going to send the petrol station business into a death spiral over the next two decades, making electric vehicles the default option for all car owners.
Why? Because charging electric vehicles is going to become much more straightforward than refuelling petrol and diesel cars.
This isn’t just because the government has banned the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030.
Imagine we were going the other way, replacing electric cars with fossil fuel power.
You are writing the risk assessment for a new petrol station. You want to dig a big hole in the ground in the middle of town, put in some tanks and fill them up with an enormous amount of highly flammable fuel.
Then you’re proposing to attach a really powerful pump and invite in random members of the public.
They’ll arrive in vehicles with hot engines. You’ll hand them the really powerful pump that sprays the highly flammable liquid.
As petrol is hazardous, refilling has to be done at petrol stations GETTY IMAGES
Without any supervision they’ll use it to transfer large quantities of the highly flammable liquid into their hot vehicle, they’ll pay you and drive off.
Are you OK to sign off on that? Do you think Health and Safety will give it the green light?
My point is that fuelling cars with petrol and diesel is dangerous, which is why we do it at specially-designed centralised refuelling points.
Ubiquitous power
Electricity, by contrast, is pretty much everywhere already. Where’s your car now? Do you think it might be near an electricity cable? Exactly.
The only challenge is how to bring that electricity a few feet to the surface so you can start getting it into your battery.
And you don’t need to be Thomas Edison to work that out.
The goal for the electric car industry is to have recharging anywhere you can park GETTY IMAGES
If you live in a flat or a house without a drive, don’t worry. The aim is to have an electric vehicle (EV) charging point at virtually every parking place.
Erik Fairbairn’s electric vehicle recharging company, Pod Point, wants to be part of this effort to rewire the UK.
“You’ll get to a point where you barely ever think about energy flowing into your car again,” he predicts.
Of course, we’re a long way from that utopia, and that should be no surprise.
We’re just at the beginning of the electric revolution: just 7% of new cars are electric and they make up a tiny fraction of vehicles on the road, so there isn’t a huge market.
There will be good profits to be made when millions of us want to recharge, just as there was a boom in petrol station construction at the dawn of the age of the car a century ago.
The first people to get charging technology at home are those with driveways who can run a cable to their electric cars.
They can already install special charging points that recharge car batteries overnight from the power supply to the house, often using the cheapest possible rates.
Typically this is a slow process. For every hour of charging you’ll get 30 miles or so of driving, but who cares when most people leave their cars parked overnight anyway and you are only paying a couple of pence a mile?
Some local authorities have begun to install similar chargers in lampposts, designers are working on charging points that can be built into the kerb and some workplaces are already putting in chargers for their employees.
We’ll be seeing lots more of all of these innovations in the years to come.
We are also starting to see some businesses putting charging points in for their customers.
You can expect to see charging points everywhere in years to come GETTY IMAGES
In fact, free charging is likely to become like free Wi-Fi, a little bribe to lure you into the shop.
Electric vehicle optimists paint a world where you can plug in anywhere you park – at home while you sleep, as you work, when you are shopping or at the cinema.
Pretty much whatever you are doing, energy will be flowing into your car.
At this point, says Erik Fairbairn, 97% of electric car charging will happen away from petrol pump equivalents.
“Imagine someone came around and filled up your car with petrol every night so you had 300 miles of range every morning,” he says. “How often would you need anything else?”
In this brave new world, you’ll only ever pull over into a service station on really epic, long journeys when you’ll top up your battery for 20-30 minutes while you have a coffee and use the facilities.
Death sentence
If this prediction is correct it is a death sentence for many of the 8,380 petrol stations in the UK.
And the decline of the industry could come surprisingly quickly. Think about it. As electric vehicles begin to edge out petrol and diesel there will be less refuelling business to go around. Those service stations on the edge of viability will begin to go to the wall.
That’ll make it that little bit harder for petrol and diesel drivers to find a service station to fill up in and the remaining operators may also feel the need to up their prices to maintain profits.
So, fewer and quite possibly more expensive petrol stations. Meanwhile, it will be getting easier and easier to charge your electric car. What’s more, as the market scales up, electric vehicles will become cheaper to buy.
You see where this is going: the more petrol stations close, the more likely we all are to go electric. In turn, more petrol stations will be forced to close. And so on.
That’s why I called it a death spiral.
As petrol stations become scarce, electric cars will become more attractive GETTY IMAGES
And don’t worry about where the electricity to power all these new cars will come from.
The National Grid says it won’t have a problem charging all the electric vehicles that are going to come onto our roads.
In fact, it isn’t expecting much of an increase in demand, just 10% when everyone is driving electric.
That’s because we drive much less than we tend to imagine. The average car journey is just 8.4 miles, according to the Department for Transport.
And, explains Isabelle Haigh, the head of national control for the National Grid, there is already quite a lot of spare capacity built into the system.
“Most charging will not be at time of peak, and peak demand has been reducing over the years so we are very confident there is enough energy to meet demand,” she says.
That’s because the grid is designed to meet the moments of greatest demand – half time in the Cup Final when we all put the kettle on, for example.
The rest of the time some generators sit idle. Electric vehicles will be able to make use of them and, because people typically charge overnight when demand is low, they are unlikely to raise the peak demand at all.
Smart charging systems will also help. They allow your charger to talk to the grid to work out the best time for your car to charge.
The idea is to make sure you get the cheapest power and also help the grid smooth out the peaks and troughs in demand.
Smart charging also helps make maximum use of renewable resources, allowing drivers to cash in on the plentiful and therefore cheap electricity available on a windy day, for instance.
Seances and convenience stores
However, the end of the service station should not be a cause for celebration. They are the only retail outlet left in some small towns and villages, and a lifeline for many people.
So, can they find an alternative role? Jack Simpson believes some will be able to.
The site of the Hyde Park Book Club was a petrol station for more than 80 years GETTY IMAGES
He’s converted an old petrol station in Leeds into a plant shop/bar/music venue/restaurant/art gallery called the Hyde Park Book Club. It has even hosted seances.
“People were popping in for dinner and I was like, Oh I’m really sorry, there’s a séance going on,” explains Jack.
He says the site’s central location, large forecourt and roomy buildings make it a very flexible venue.
“I think it also fits in with this post hipster obsession with 20th Century Western culture,” he says.
Brian Madderson, the chairman of the Petrol Retailers Association (PRA), is more down to earth. The PRA represents 5,500 independent fuel retailers who account for 70% of all forecourts and Mr Madderson says his members have started adapting to the post internal combustion engine world.
Many are already investing in full convenience stores, high-quality take away food and automated car washes to boost their income and, he says, they will continue to enable motorists to fill up their petrol and diesel vehicles for as long as is feasible.
He thinks the transition away from petrol and diesel will take decades. “These vehicles will simply not disappear off the roads overnight. Petrol and diesel stations will be essential in keeping the country mobile beyond 2030,” he says.
Maybe. Yet technological change can be very rapid and very disruptive.
Look what happened to the horse and cart at the turn of the 20th Century.
Some service stations will certainly live on – those on motorways, for example – but many are likely to go the same way as the people Jack Simpson’s guests were trying to reach at their séance – unless they can find new ways to bring in cash.
