Gautam Adani spent four decades and billions of dollars without being the hustle and bustle he became at the age of 15, when he dropped out of school and left home for the diamond district of Mumbai, India.

But he’s still in a hurry.

Over the past five years, Adani, an Indian industrialist, has seen his net worth skyrocket. 1440 percentuntil he reached about 120,000 million dollars, of which he became the man richer from Asia and one of the four richest people on the planet.

A considerable portion of that fortune comes from coal mining, transportation and combustion, as India has done duplicate using this fossil fuel to economically and reliably fuel its rapidly growing economy and lift millions of people out of poverty.

However, Adani is also poised to be a decisive force in India’s green future, having committed tens of billions of dollars to development. renewable energy along with its investments in coal.

Much depends on achieving that balance.

Last year, the Prime Minister’s government Narendra Modi – with whom Adani has a long-standing relationship – is committed to seeing India arrive zero emissions net carbon emissions by 2070, an important milestone for the country, albeit a target that is decades behind other major nations.

The country has taken some steps towards this goal.

India, with its abundant sunlight, is now in fourth place in solar generation, having multiplied its capacity by more than one hundred from 2011 to 2021.

Modi promised that India, the third most polluting country of the world, you will go around 50 percent of its energy from renewable sources, such as solar, wind and green hydrogen, by 2030, compared to 40% today.

However, the emphasis on economic growth shared by Modi and Adani means that India will burn coal, in ever greater quantities. greater for decades to come.

This has raised questions about the role the country, which is projected to be the world’s fastest growing energy consumer in the coming decades, will ultimately play in urgent global efforts to reduce heat trapping emissions and prevent a climate catastrophe.

Adani, 60, represents the solid self-confidence of a country taking advantage of a global power reshuffle in the midst of Russia’s war in Ukraine, defying criticism of its growing expansion into coal as it seeks to change its capitalist image. coal a time warrior.

In an interview at his New Delhi home, Adani said it would be unfair to ask India to disproportionately sacrifice growth for global climate goals.

Places like the United States and Europe have issued much more carbon over the centuries and have reaped the rewards of development.

“India has to go from being a developing country to being a developed nation, and energy is like food,” Adani said.

His conglomerate, he added, provides “what my country and its citizens need: economical and reliable energy“.

“We always align our business and business philosophy with what the country needs,” he said.

Streets

The parallel and perhaps opposite routes that Adani and his country take can be seen in Mundra, the coastal city in the western state of Gujarat, where the Adani Group built India’s largest private port.

Next to the port of Mundra there is a solar panel factory and a coal-fired power plant.

The former barren land, reclaimed and sunburned brackish marsh, dotted with signs along its driveways and factories urging people to save electricity, is now the clearest symbol of Adani’s control over what drives the land. economy of India.

The company has ambitious plans to expand solar and wind power plants near the port, but most of the electricity in Mundra’s Adani Special Economic Zone comes from coal.

A conveyor belt transports imported coal directly from the dock to two plants which together make up the largest thermoelectric plant in India.

The generated energy is transmitted in the state of harianna, hundreds of kilometers to the north.

Grupo Adani has started manufacturing its own solar panel cells and plans to design the rest of the materials for the supply chain in the coming years.

The company, which already distributes wind power through its extensive transmission lines, is also building its own turbines.

He plans to build two battery factories and invest in green hydrogena key component of Adani’s renewable energy strategy.

Adani grew up in a vibrant medieval enclave of Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat.

After leaving home to enter the Bombay diamond business, he returned to run his brother’s small plastics factory.

He turned to imports when the Indian economy started liberalizing in the early 1990s.

In interview with New York Times he said he learned the value of controlling supply chains when the family’s plastics factory faced a severe shortage of polymers.

In the late 1990s, he said he applied that knowledge when India started opening up its economy and faced a severe energy deficit.

In the early 2000s, between 300 and 400 million Indians did not have access to electricity.

Now, Adani presides over a $ 200 billion conglomerate of companies as diverse as they are apples, concrete and military dronesand is set to acquire India’s latest independent news channel.

At its core is its energy empire, with a private railway line used to transport coal and other goods, as well as a dozen ports on India’s east and west coasts.

Journalists and other observers from Gujarat say who have followed Adani’s meteoric rise benefited of his long association with Modi, India’s most powerful leader in decades.

Adani said he met Modi nearly 30 years ago, when the future prime minister, also a Gujarati, was a fierce apparatchik in a right-wing Hindu fraternal organization known as RSS.

As a first-generation businessman, Adani said, he wanted to meet all the political actors in Gujarat.

In 2001 Modi was promoted to prime minister, the highest office in the state.

The following year he was accused of not doing enough to stop the communal uprisings that dragged on for months and cost the lives of more than a thousand people, mostly Muslims.

He was temporarily barred from entering the United States.

Adani, as a participant in overseas tours promoting Gujarat as an investment destination, helped restore picture modes appearing at his side.

In 2014, when Modi became prime minister, he flew to New Delhi aboard an Adani plane.

More recently, Adani won coal mining contracts despite fierce public opposition in an elephant corridor in Chhattisgarh state.

And the prime minister’s political alliances in South Asia appear to have given Adani the entrance to develop a special economic zone in Bangladesh and a wind power project in Sri Lanka.

This has created a widespread perception in India that Adani’s relationship with Modi allows her to do any business she wants, creating an uneven playing field.

Adani said he and Modi looked at each other with mutual respect, but it wasn’t friendship or special treatment.

“It’s a wonderful job this government has done,” he said.

Adani’s biggest hit, however, was in Australia.

His Carmichael project is one of the largest open-cast coal mining operations in the world; To achieve this, Adani had to endure a protracted activist-led climate campaign Greta Thunberg and negotiate with half a dozen Australian governments as prime ministers came and went.

After the lenders pulled out, Adani had to put $ 7 billion out of his own pocket.

This year the start of operations at the mine was lucky:

India and Australia signed a free trade agreement in April.

Once the agreement is ratified, Grupo Adani will be able to import large quantities of coal tax free.

Adani, the world’s largest coal trader, is poised to become the world’s largest coal importer.

So even though the Adani conglomerate dedicates 80% of its total capital expenditure to renewable energy, its critics point out that the other 20% remains a problem.

“To say that you care about the climate crisis, that you are part of the transition to clean energy, as you build huge new coal mines and power plants, as well as various others under development that you refuse to shelve, is a ecological bleaching without a doubt, “accused Pablo Brait, an activist from Market Forces, an environmental advocacy group in Australia.

Over the past decade, competition has reduced the costs of solar energy so much that it is now as cheap as coal in India, and sometimes cheaper.

However, some of the initial enthusiasm for the industry onlyr India seems to have vanished.

The government is expected to reach its goal of 100 gigawatts of grid-connected solar power by the end of this year.

The sector is hampered by a shortage of know-how and skilled labor, as well as a reliance on expensive equipment from China.

The Adani Group and other companies intend to change this by manufacturing photovoltaic panels and other equipment in India.

But at the same time, the war in Ukraine only reinforced the argument that India’s most powerful politician and its richest man went for coal.

India has its own supply and much of the shortage can be covered by Adani mines abroad.

“A war,” Adani said of climate advocates in the West, “and look at how exposed they are.”

c.2022 The New York Times Company