Energy storage in India--how it has evolved and its potential

Ankit Mittal
CEO and co-Founder of Sheru, an energy storage company

The energy sector in recent years has seen a shift towards renewable energy, and this trend is set to accelerate in the future as well. However, renewable energy is by nature variable and power is generated only during favourable conditions of sunshine or wind. We then have to devise solutions to ensure power is available round-the-clock, to not compromise our energy supply.

One way to do this is through energy storage, where energy is stored and used later. With sufficient energy storage, we can store energy from renewable sources and use it when supply from these sources is lower than demand. While simple on paper, there are several factors such as technology, policy, and economics that decide the outcome of a project.

Renewable energy in India has seen a great deal of growth in recent years. India’s current installed capacity of renewables is over 160 GW, which is 40% of the total installed power capacity. However, energy storage has not kept pace with the growth of renewable energy, and India had just 20 MW of battery storage capacity at the end of 2021. Hydro projects, which include pumped hydro, were a much larger figure at 46 GW at the end of March 2022. While pumped hydro has its advantages such as low operating costs, it requires very specific geographic conditions to be satisfied. This restricts the number of projects that can be built using pumped hydro, and battery energy storage systems (BESS) will have to play a large role in coming years.

This is especially significant as India has big ambitions for renewable energy – 500 GW of installed capacity by 2030. While overall electricity demand would continue to rise on account of the electrification of mobility and increased power demand due to economic growth, renewables will continue to be a larger share of the overall mix and are set to be almost half of the power generation capacity by 2030. To optimise the amount of green energy in the grid, there needs to be a scaling up of the battery storage network.

However, BESS has numerous issues which have led to a slower rollout – high CAPEX, low utilisation (short duration storage means that it only needs to be used to store energy during a few hours of peak production across a day), and technological factors make it a difficult system to work with.

One of the rather exciting solutions for short-duration storage is the integration of EVs with the power grid and using their batteries to store excess energy. This is known as Vehicle-2-grid (V2G) and is being trialled in many countries around the world. At Sheru, we are creating a version of this by aggregating batteries from different sources and creating a virtual storage network. This reduces the need for building out separate BESS infrastructure for power producers and utilities and optimises the use of the batteries.

For renewables to increase and be better integrated into the power grid, battery storage is essential. While some issues need to be addressed, it offers the best path for cleaning up our power grid and making it run on renewables.