At the 45th RIL AGMMukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries, announced a new Giga Factory for Power Electronics. This will be one of the key components linking the entire value chain of Green Energy is affordable and reliable power electronics.
“We are building significant capabilities in the design and manufacturing of power electronics and software systems, integrating with our capabilities of Telecommunications, Cloud Computing and IoT platform. We will build this through partnerships with leading global players to provide most affordable solutions, meeting global standards of performance, safety, and reliability,” said Ambani in his speech.
In addition to solar energy, Reliance is also actively progressing on bio-energy, offshore wind, and other non-conventional forms of renewable energy, and will continue to expand our manufacturing ecosystem, Ambani added.
Last year, Reliance announced the setting up of the Dhirubhai Ambani Green Energy Giga Complex in Jamnagar. “Our aim is to establish and enable at least 100GW of solar energy by 2030. The work done so far has reaffirmed my conviction in solar energy and has provided further impetus to our investment thesis to establish four Giga Factories. First, for photovoltaic panels; Second, for energy storage; Third, for Green Hydrogen; And Fourth, for fuel cell systems,” the RIL Chairman said.
WHAT ARE GIGA FACTORIES?
While giga factories aren’t a legacy phrase associated with mainstream industries, it has become a mainstay of modern and new generation clean energy companies. The term was first mentioned by mercurial Tesla and SpaceX chief, Elon Musk, sometime in 2013 – in association with the massive battery production facility that Tesla, his electric car company, was building. While there isn’t an exact dictionary definition of what a giga factory is, there are two common understandings of the term – one states that a giga factory signifies a factory that is capable of end-to-end production of thousands of gigawatts of energy, via end-to-end battery manufacturing process. The other interpretation of the term is that a giga factory generally points to a massive factory – with ‘Giga’ denoting the sheer scale of the enterprise.
Whichever definition is considered, a giga factory is, by all means, a factory of epic proportions. It involves an end-to-end process of building commercially usable energy cells and batteries from start to finish – right from sourcing raw materials, to having all the requisite instruments and material within one place, to churning out the finished cells and batteries. A giga factory essentially brings together multiple companies and entities that source components, bring together highly specialised instruments, and numerous business processes that are tied together to make such a factory work.
It is this that requires a giga factory to be absolutely massive in terms of size, since it incorporates so many different elements together. However, it also makes the process of battery manufacturing more economical, since it does not require the heavy cost that may be incurred in moving volatile energy processes from one place to another. Gigafactories also deploy cutting-edge technologies and create thousands of jobs in order to execute the entire process.
Earlier, at the 44th RIL AGM, Mukesh Ambani had announced that the company will make a major push for new and renewable sources of energy. As part of his move, Ambani stated that Reliance Industries now plans to build four “giga factories”, which will be intended to “manufacture and integrate all critical components of new energy ecosystem.” The RIL CMD committed a sum of Rs 60,000 crore to invest in setting up of four giga factories – one for solar photovoltaic cells, one for advanced energy storage batteries, one for electrolysers, and one for fuel cells.
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