Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

This is Shashwat here for Green Margins today. 

Reliance Industries’ (RIL) annual general meetings can be a bit like Budget Day for Indian business news organisations. The conglomerate has its fingers in pretty much every pie, and keeps growing in every new business it has chosen to venture into. 

For business reporters these past few years, chances were that if you weren’t already tracking a Reliance offshoot, the AGM would give you a shiny new Reliance venture to get lost in. 

Well, I was part of the latter group last June, when RIL chairman Mukesh Ambani spent a significant portion of his speech talking about Reliance’s new energy ambitions—overall investment of Rs 75,000 crore (~US$10 billion) in three years; a fully-integrated end-to-end renewables energy ecosystem; a 5,000-acre green energy “Giga complex” in Jamnagar…

For a clean-energy enthusiast like me, it was all very exciting. And I wasn’t the only one feeling that way. Smaller players in the Indian clean and renewable energy sector found their hopes lifted too. RIL getting into the sector “provided some mainstream legitimacy to renewables”, a government official told me then.