Adani Group – Largest Solar Player in India

One of the biggest advantages and value add of a blog over the mainstream media is that you can write the truth, instead of playing it safe and not antagonizing powerful people and entities. In India there are lot of things which are never written down on paper by the biggest media groups, either because they are themselves compromised or they do not want to get on the wrong side of other power business entities. Many of the media groups such as the Zee group have been implicated in the past, of taking massive sums of money to run/not run corruption stories about other business groups. However like all things in India, court cases go on interminably and no punishment of the guilty takes place. There might be an exception or two but in general this has been the scenario in India. Business as usual continues with the government agencies, banks , consultants and the business groups all participating or turning a blind eye to blantant wrong doing. Ethics in the Indian social milieu is an alien concept, though there is a huge amount of lip service paid to it.

Coming back to the topic, India’s most powerful conglomerate the Adani Group has become super aggressive in the rapidly growing solar energy sector. The group has been aggressively bidding in solar auctions taking place across the country, and is also building a large new 1000 MW solar cell and module plant in Gujarat.

Also read Adanis in Rajasthan.

The company recently commissioned a sweetheart deal for a 650 MW solar power plant in TN. We have already talked about the sweetheart deal that the company managed with the TN government getting a much higher price for its power, as compared to other deals which were 15-20% lower. Like all other things, there was a small hue and cry but as the news channels moved onto spicier stories, this also died a natural death.

The Adani Group is known for its proximity to India’s most powerful leader Narendra Modi and is almost untouchable in the current context. Even as other large business groups struggle with huge amounts of debt, the Adanis are not at all worried about their massive pile of debt. They are aggressively building out greenfield and brownfield opportunities in capital intensive sectors of power, mining, ports etc., without worrying about funding. The government owned banks would not like to take on the powerful Adanis and are happily funding the increasingly leverage group. Reminds me of the Jaypee Group in 2009, which had great relations with the government and was taking on copious amounts of debt to build out F1 tracks.

As per recent reports, the Adani’s current pipeline and installed capacity is now almost 3 GW, which makes it the largest solar developer in terms of capacity. Given the group’s aggressive streak where it bid almost 30% lower for a SECI reverse auction in Chhattisgarh, it will keep wearing the crown going forward.

While some people may call the bids foolhardly, there are other factors at play in India’s fast growing solar tendering environment than just pure economics. The Adanis are also considering buying SunEdison’s assets in India, which is almost 1.5 GW. This will make it by far the largest solar player in the country, with a strong backward linkage into manufacturing as well.