Reliance’s Green Hydrogen Bet

ELI5/TLDR

Reliance wants to make hydrogen — the clean kind, split out of water using solar power instead of burned out of gas — and it wants to make it cheaper than anyone on Earth. The plan is to own the entire chain: the sunlight, the solar panels, the machines that split the water, and the fuel that comes out the other end. It’s all going up at Jamnagar in Gujarat, on a 5,000-acre site Reliance likes to call four times the size of Tesla’s Gigafactory. The headline promise, made back in 2021, is “1-1-1” — green hydrogen under one dollar a kilo within one decade. The grand targets are still mostly targets. But the first real bricks are now laid: solar panels are rolling off the line, government incentives have been won at record-low bids, and the first big export customer has signed. The electrolyser factory — the actual hydrogen-making part — is supposed to switch on by the end of 2026. Watch that date.

The Full Story

The shape of the bet

Most companies that promise cheap green hydrogen are trying to win one race. Reliance is trying to win four at once, on the theory that the only way to make the math work is to own every link in the chain so nobody else gets to take a margin off you.

Green hydrogen’s cost comes down to two things: the price of the electricity you feed in, and the cost of the machine — the electrolyser — that uses that electricity to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen. Buy both from the market and you’re at the mercy of two sets of suppliers. Reliance’s answer is to make both itself, next to each other, at a scale large enough that the per-unit cost collapses. Own the sunshine, own the panels that catch it, own the machines that split the water, own the fuel that comes out — and own the customers you sell it to.

That is the whole strategy in one sentence: vertical integration, taken to an extreme.

The place: Jamnagar

It all lands at one address — the Dhirubhai Ambani Green Energy Giga Complex at Jamnagar, the same coastal town where Reliance already runs the world’s largest oil refinery. The new complex sprawls across 5,000 acres and is meant to house five factories under one roof:

solar photovoltaic panels
electrolysers (the hydrogen machines)
fuel cells
energy storage (batteries)
power electronics

At the 2025 AGM, Anant Ambani put the building area at 44 million square feet and described it as roughly four times Tesla’s Gigafactory. Worth a flag: that figure, and the “largest in the world” language that travels with it, is Reliance’s own self-reported framing, not an independently audited number. Impressive, but it’s a press release stat, not a survey.

The money

Two numbers anchor the commitment, both from the early days:

₹75,000 crore (~$10 billion) for the New Energy business, pledged at the June 2021 AGM. Still the standing headline figure.
₹5.95 lakh crore — a much larger MoU signed with the Gujarat government in January 2022, covering a 100 GW renewables-plus-hydrogen ecosystem, of which roughly ₹60,000 crore is earmarked for new-energy manufacturing.

The honest caveat: these are 2021–22 announcements. They are commitments and ambitions, not money already spent and producing returns. The gap between a pledge and a running plant is exactly what the rest of this story is about.

The technology: where the $1/kg actually comes from

The cost goal has a slogan — “1-1-1” — coined by Mukesh Ambani at a 2021 climate summit: $1 per kilogram, within 1 decade. He went further, saying Reliance would hit it “well before the turn of this decade.” For context, green hydrogen today typically costs several dollars a kilo; getting under one dollar would make it genuinely competitive with the dirty hydrogen the world runs on now.

How do you get there? Two levers, and Reliance is pulling both.

Lever one — the electrolyser. In October 2021 Reliance signed a manufacturing agreement with Denmark’s Stiesdal A/S to mass-produce its low-cost alkaline electrolysers in India. The pitch is striking: Stiesdal’s design targets around €200 per kilowatt, against the €500–1,000/kW typical of the field. If that holds at scale, it knocks out a huge slice of the capex that keeps green hydrogen expensive. The electrolyser gigafactory is slated to begin production by the end of 2026 and scale to 3 GW a year. Reliance publicly reaffirmed that 2026 timeline as recently as January 2026 — and notably, the one stumble that did surface (a collapsed battery-technology deal with a Chinese partner) hit the battery line, not the electrolysers.

Lever two — the cheap electricity. This is where the solar build-out comes in (below). Renewable power is the single largest input cost in green hydrogen, so the cheaper Reliance can generate its own solar, the closer that dollar gets.

Building the solar supply chain by acquisition

Reliance didn’t wait to build solar expertise from scratch — it bought it.

REC Solar — acquired from China National Bluestar in October 2021 for an enterprise value of $771 million, bringing polysilicon-to-panel technology now redeployed at Jamnagar. (One wrinkle: REC’s old Norwegian polysilicon line actually shut in late 2023 — the value to Reliance is the technology, not the Norway plant.)
NexWafe — a ~€25 million strategic investment in the German firm’s high-efficiency silicon wafers.
Sterling & Wilson — a 40% stake (~₹2,845 crore) in the solar EPC contractor, locking in the build-out muscle.

The result is now visibly producing: the first 200 MW of HJT (heterojunction, 720-watt) solar modules rolled off a line commissioned in April 2025, with the plan to scale to 10 GWp and then 20 GWp a year.

The power behind it

To feed all those electrolysers, Reliance is assembling captive renewable generation at a scale that’s hard to picture:

A 550,000-acre renewable site in Kutch, Gujarat — nearly three times the size of Singapore — with solar generation expected to commission around H1 FY27.
A 6 GWp solar project in Andhra Pradesh, tied to a planned data-centre build-out.
An umbrella goal to establish or enable 100 GW of solar by 2030 (some of that is capacity Reliance helps others install, not all owned).

What has actually happened

Strip away the targets and here is the demonstrated progress as of mid-2026:

Solar modules in production — first 200 MW of HJT panels, April 2025 line.
Government incentives won, at record-low bids. Under India’s SIGHT scheme, Reliance secured 300 MW of electrolyser manufacturing capacity plus 90,000 tonnes-a-year of green hydrogen production — at an average incentive of ₹18.9/kg, the lowest bid among all winners. In plain terms: Reliance told the government it can do this more cheaply than any rival, and put that claim on record.
First export customer signed. A binding ~$3 billion, 15-year green ammonia deal with Samsung C&T (March 2026), with supply starting in the second half of FY29 — billed as “the first in a series.”

Where it’s headed

The flagship production target, set at the August 2025 AGM, is 3 million tonnes a year of green hydrogen equivalent by 2032. The word “equivalent” matters: that figure spans the whole family — hydrogen plus green ammonia, e-methanol, and sustainable aviation fuel — not 3 million tonnes of pure hydrogen. Most of it is meant for export and for decarbonising Reliance’s own refineries.

Claude’s Take

The thing that separates this from the usual green-hydrogen vapourware is that Reliance has done the unglamorous parts first. Plenty of companies announce a $1/kg target. Far fewer go and buy a polysilicon manufacturer, sign an electrolyser-tech partner, win the government auction at the lowest bid in the room, and lock a 15-year export contract — all before the hydrogen plant is even switched on. The SIGHT bid at ₹18.9/kg is the tell: that’s not a brochure number, it’s a price Reliance committed to in a competitive auction. They’re putting their own credibility on the cost curve.

That said, keep the skepticism dial where it belongs. The biggest, most-quoted numbers — $10 billion, 100 GW, the 1-1-1 cost goal — are all 2021–22 vintage, and none of the actual hydrogen has been made yet. The electrolyser factory is the whole ballgame, and it’s still a future event (“by end-2026”) that has every opportunity to slip the way large industrial projects always can. The superlatives (“4× Tesla,” “world’s largest single-site”) are marketing, and the “3 MMTPA by 2032” is a portfolio figure that quietly bundles in ammonia and methanol — so it’ll read bigger than the pure-hydrogen reality.

Net: this is the most credibly-funded, most vertically-integrated green hydrogen attempt in the world, and also one whose central promise remains entirely unproven in production. The honest scorecard is “serious money, serious infrastructure, real early milestones — zero kilograms of green hydrogen sold so far.” The next eighteen months, and specifically whether that electrolyser line lights up on schedule, will tell you which way this tips.

A score of 7: high confidence in the facts here (most are anchored to Reliance’s own filings, an IEEFA institutional report, and consistent trade-press coverage of the AGMs), tempered by the simple fact that the headline outcome hasn’t happened yet — so the most interesting questions stay open.

Open Questions

Is any green hydrogen being produced today? As of mid-2026, the evidence points to pre-production — solar modules and incentives, but no commissioned electrolysers or pilot output yet confirmed.
Has the 1-1-1 cost goal been reaffirmed or quietly revised in the 2024–26 AGMs, given how electrolyser and power economics have actually moved?
Beyond Samsung C&T, what other offtake deals exist, and how much contracted volume do they represent against the 3 MMTPA target?
What’s the status of the fuel-cell and power-electronics factories — the two of the five Jamnagar plants that current reporting barely covers?

Reliance's Green Hydrogen Bet