President Donald Trump's decision to freeze a law banning business bribes overseas could offer Indian tycoon Gautam Adani, one of Asia's richest people, a reprieve from American corruption allegations linked to a major solar project in India.
U.S. prosecutors allege that one of Adani's companies duped investors by hiding that its project was backed by a $265 million bribery scheme. The case now may be reviewed, and enforcement of any potential decision against it is uncertain. Whatever its fate, the case has highlighted vulnerabilities in India’s solar sector that are hindering its capacity to switch to clean energy, help limit climate change and cut heavy pollution in many of its cities.
The Adani Group, whose business interests span much of the economy from ports and airports to energy and media, has denied the U.S. allegations. It declined requests from The Associated Press for comment.
Earlier this month, Trump suspended the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, raising expectations among some in India that the allegations against Adani might be put on ice. Shares in Adani’s companies surged but then fell just days later when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sought help from Indian authorities in serving its complaint against Adani.
The allegations have had wider repercussions outside India. Adani Green Energy has withdrawn its wind energy projects from Sri Lanka after the island nation sought to renegotiate prices. Kenya canceled energy and airport expansion deals with the company, while investor TotalEnergies, a French oil giant, has paused new investments.
Adani's energy projects
Adani Green Energy, or AGEL, is India’s largest renewable energy company. It is building one of the world’s largest clean power projects in salt deserts bordering Pakistan in the Western Indian state of Gujarat. Once completed, they would produce 30 gigawatts of clean power, enough to power nearly 18 million Indian homes.
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AGEL has projects in 12 Indian states, with 11.6 gigawatts of clean power capacity. It aims to generate 50 gigawatts of renewable power by 2030, a tenth of India’s clean energy goal for the same time period.
In November, Adani said his company would invest $35 billion over five years in large-scale solar, wind, and hybrid power plants across India. It is also one of the country's few large-scale producers of solar and wind power components. But the industry itself is struggling.
Cash-strapped Indian states
India's state-owned electricity companies are chronically short on cash. By 2022-23 their losses totaled $7.8 billion — 2.4% of India’s GDP, according to government data. Operations are plagued by bad planning, fears of public anger over higher electricity rates and large electricity losses during transmission.
“Waiving the costs upfront makes it cheap for those building power plants, but ultimately the system has to bear that cost,” said Rohit Chandra, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi.
Accommodating inevitable fluctuations in solar and wind power is also costly, said Vibhuti Garg, an energy economist at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis or IEEFA. That means keeping expensive coal power on standby.
Renewable energy is cheaper than coal in India, but utilities still view clean power as just a “statutory obligation,” said Alexander Hogeveen Rutter, an energy analyst in Bengaluru.
A backfiring federal scheme
To troubleshoot state utilities' financial woes, the federal government agency established the Solar Energy Corporation of India, or SECI, to help manage risks.
SECI awarded a contract of 12 gigawatts of solar energy to the Adani Group and another New York Stock Exchange-listed company, Azure Power, at a specific price. The U.S. indictment alleges that state utilities balked at buying power at that rate and that the bribery was aimed at getting them to sign on.
Azure Power said in a statement in November that it was cooperating with American agencies and that it had ceased to employ the people mentioned in the indictment. SECI didn't respond to queries from The Associated Press.
SECI doesn’t buy clean power but facilitates sales to Indian states. That cuts risks of power developers going unpaid but it has raised administrative costs, Rutter said. "This whole scheme, which was supposed to drive down costs is actually driving up costs,” he said.
Rising manufacturing costs
India restricts imports of cheap Chinese solar modules and is subsidizing local manufacturers. That helped raise domestic production by six-fold in 2021-2023, according to the Press Trust of India, though Indian-made solar components are more expensive than Chinese one.
But India lags behind countries like Brazil and Australia in rooftop solar, having installed only 11 gigawatts so far -– far less than the 40 gigawatts it aimed to have by 2022. Policies favoring large installations have constrained growth of solar, which mainly comes from football-field-sized farms, Rutter said.
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Many large renewable energy companies, like Adani's, manufacture parts like solar panels and cells to help reduce their own costs and remain profitable while selling power at lower prices acceptable to the state-owned utilities, Garg said. But this limits competition since small companies — considered vital for India's clean energy ambitions — can't match the prices set by corporate giants that make the equipment used to generate solar power.
A weak regulatory framework
The U.S. indictment has exposed weaknesses spots in India’s regulatory framework, which is prone to “crony relationships” between companies and the government, said Joe Athialy, executive director of the New Delhi-based Centre for Financial Accountability.
Most government bids are conducted transparently, with some even driving down prices to unviable levels, said Vinay Rustagi, an independent energy consultant. But occasional “one-off tenders” are poorly publicized or slip under the radar, limiting competition.
The fraud allegations against Adani reflect "an extreme example of trying to combine solar project development with solar manufacturing,” he said.
Slowing solar
Slower progress for India's transition away from fossil fuels matters. It's the most populous nation, with 1.4 billion people in 2023, and its electricity demand is projected to grow by at least 6% annually for the next few years, according to the International Energy Agency.
India's solar capacity has been growing rapidly with record-high solar power installations reported in 2024. But while solar makes up 16% of India's total generating capacity, it accounts for only 4% of the electricity used, according to government data compiled by IEEFA. The global average was over 5% in 2023, according to the London-based think tank Ember.
By late 2024, SECI still didn’t have buyers for 9 gigawatts or more than a third of the 24.5 gigawatts of solar power capacity it can offer.
As is true in many places, insufficient storage capacity means solar projects struggle to find buyers since the utilities prefer to purchase stable, ready-to-use power. This is why only 16% of last year’s new solar projects had found buyers by November, compared to 44% the year before, according to a report by the financial services firm JM Financial Institutional Securities.
“India’s solar story, while still growing, is slowing down,” said Chandra.