Following up on June 24's "As U.S. Bans Some Chinese Solar Imports, India Makes A Big Bet", it's not just solar that interests Mr. Ambani.
From Bloomberg via the Financial Post, July 1:
Asia’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani, has a $10 billion plan to scale up zero-carbon hardware in India. Reliance Industries, the oil- and refining-heavy conglomerate that he controls, intends to develop four huge ” giga factories” to manufacture photovoltaic modules, batteries, fuel cells, and–importantly–electrolyzers to produce hydrogen.
It’s a big plan, but short of details. Still, it bridges two aspects of decarbonization: technologies that exist today and are economical at scale, and those that need a major effort to get to that point.
A factory capable of manufacturing 100 gigawatts of solar panels in nine years is impressive, certainly, but it’s not out of the realm of today’s possibilities. A number of companies already manufacture more than 10 gigawatts of modules a year. Scale exists for batteries too, and manufacturing expansions that will more than double today’s production capacity are already underway. Those technologies plug right into our electrical grid, as do fuel cells.
Hydrogen is different. It can play a role in the power sector as a zero-carbon fuel, but it probably has more value in industrial processes that need high heat, historically supplied by natural gas, coal, or oil. Swedish steelmaker SSAB AB is planning to make zero-carbon steel within five years using hydrogen. Doing so in a zero-emissions way–that is, using electrolyzers powered by renewables to isolate hydrogen atoms from water molecules, rather than deriving hydrogen from fossil fuels–depends on a number of factors, beginning with competitive cost. Cost is a function of supply, which is in turn a function of manufacturing cost–which is where Ambani’s gigafactory-sized ambition comes in....
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