India presents a potential investment opportunity of $50 billion for battery storage facilities that could help integrate renewable energy into the grid, replace polluting diesel-fueled power and boost electric mobility, according to Andres Gluski, CEO of American energy firm AES Corp.
“Battery-based energy storage has an essential role to play in helping India realize its vision for a more sustainable energy future,” Gluski said, in an interview with Bloomberg.
Gluski was in India to launch the country’s first utility-scale battery storage system, which has been installed to support the grid in New Delhi. The 10 MW system, at Tata Power Delhi Distribution’s Rohini substation, was built by AES with Mitsubishi for almost $9 million. It uses the Advancion energy storage platform from Fluence, a joint venture between Siemens and AES.
India has set a target of reaching 175 GW of renewable power generation capacity by 2022. The ability of the grid to integrate intermittent renewables and the huge investment required to upgrade the nation’s transmission and distribution infrastructure, are key challenges for India to meet its ambitious target.
Energy storage can help better integrate renewables by providing multiple services to the grid system, such as optimizing transmission and distribution investment, addressing forecasting errors associated with wind and solar generation for more accurate scheduling, solving local reliability issues by providing reactive power support, equipping end users to manage peak loads, and enabling more efficient utilization of distributed renewable generation.
