SUSTAINABILITY

Vaishali Nigam Sinha Co-Founder ReNew

“ People in government or in business thought it was a‘ nice to do’. But nobody thought you could actually make money from a sustainability-related business,” she says. That scepticism was central to ReNew’ s early challenge. It had to prove that renewable energy could deliver returns, not just good intentions.“ If you’ re very comfortable with something, the opportunity to create value isn’ t as great,” she adds.“ And if something isn’ t really understood by the ecosystem, but you have the conviction, then perhaps you must go for it.” ReNew now has around 14GW of installed capacity and a pipeline of more than 20GW. In April of this year, the company said it had commissioned about 2.4GW of renewable capacity in FY2026, taking total operating capacity to about 12.6GW – scale that underpins just how renewable energy is a business built on long-term capital, execution and confidence in future cash flows. Before working in energy, Vaishali worked in finance in New York and London after completing a master’ s degree at Columbia University – experience that gave her a close view of how capital is allocated, what investors look for and how difficult it can be to turn an emerging idea into something financeable.

Securing capital structure and scale ReNew’ s growth has been tied to the way it built itself as an investable platform. Rather than remaining a narrow project developer, it expanded into a broader cleanenergy business that could support multiple revenue streams and attract larger pools of capital – enabling it to move from solely wind into solar, storage, green hydrogen and manufacturing. Vaishali describes that shift as moving“ from electrons to molecules as well”.

102 September 2026