A key to India achieving its COP 26 pledge of 500 gigawatts (GW) of non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030 is energy storage. Considering the importance of battery energy storage systems (BESS) in India’s electricity mix, businessline in a podcast with Rahul Walawalkar, the President & MD of Customized Energy Solutions India, went down the memory lane on how BESS gained prominence. Walawalkar is a noted authority on BESS. More than a decade back, he founded the India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA), the primer industry body dealing with storage solutions and technologies.

He pointed out that India started working on energy storage technologies around 2012-13, which gathered significant acceleration after formation of the International Solar Alliance (ISA). Besides, in 2014, after the Narendra Modi government came to power, India’s solar manufacturing aspirations firmed up even more.

Walawalkar explained that a drastic change in this landscape happed roughly in the last five years, where there is awareness now that India has an opportunity to become a global hub for energy storage. And with that, now almost 10 ministries are involved in looking after various aspects.

“So, it’s a quite an interesting development how various government agencies are looking at storage as an enable. And it is very clear to almost all the people who know the system, that without energy storage, the 500 GW target is just not possible,” he added. He emphasised that there is a realisation in the government now that India needs to start deploying storage at a mass scale.

Walawalkar also talked about the economies of scale in energy storage. He pointed out that in the past decade, the interest in electricity storage solutions has increased exponentially. He elaborated on how the new generation energy storage technologies can utilise structures to capture multiple value streams in the electricity markets.

For instance, what has changed drastically, Walawalkar said, is that back in 2008, when the first grid scale energy storage projects started getting deployed, the capital cost was anywhere from $600-1,200 per kilowatt hour for different technologies. Lithium-ion batteries at that time incurred a cost of more than $1,000 per kilowatt hour, and some of the alternate technologies like flow batteries, or sodium sulphur batteries were at around $500.

At that time, markets were looking at lithium-ion batteries primarily for providing ancillary services—where you need maybe one hour or less duration of storage—and looking at sodium sulphur or flow batteries for longer duration for six hour or longer. As a result, Lithium-ion batteries due to application in consumer electronics, and E-mobility have scaled up manufacturing tremendously. It went from less than 10-gigawatt hour (GWh) of manufacturing to now more than 1,000 GWh within a span of 15 years. This led to an exponential price reduction similar to what has happened in solar.

(Host: Rishi Ranjan Kala, Producer: Anjana PV)

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About the State Of The Economy podcast

India’s economy has been hailed as the bright spot amid the general gloom that seems to have enveloped the rest of the world. But several of its sectors still stutter about even while others seem set to fire on all cylinders. To help you make sense of the bundle of contradictions that the country is, businessline brings you podcasts with experts ranging from finance and marketing to technology and start-ups. 

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