With the rise in the electric vehicle market, demand for batteries and energy storage has escalated. Thus, the Indian government has started urging battery-based energy storage manufacturers to set up plants in India.
As future tenders will cover hybrid solar and wind projects along with energy storage, Indian power minister R.K. Singh has been rather keen on the investment in manufacturing units. Singh said the government would soon release a policy with a focus on ‘Make in India’. He further added,
“Tenders for procuring e-vehicles have already been issued and we have started procuring the vehicles. This is going to increase.”
The Indian government has also made plans to incentivize battery manufacturing in India. Also, the government has already started discussions with resource-rich countries such as Bolivia to provide the raw materials needed for battery manufacturing.
But, high GST rates are causing concern for the industry representatives and they are enforcing that the preference to be given to India based manufacturers.
Energy-Storage.News has previously reported that the latest Indian national Budget saw a hike in customs duties for lithium-ion batteries from 10% to 20%, which is unhelpful to India’s overall energy storage industry unless there is enough domestic manufacturing to meet demand.
Involvement of ISRO and department of space is also expected as the power minister is urging them to come with up recent technologies.
Dr Rahul Walawalkar, president and MD of Customized Energy Solutions and an executive director of the India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA) has said previously that 2017 was the year when Indian industries started investing in setting up manufacturing capabilities for developing li-ion battery packs in India with IESA members such as Exicom, Delta and ACME leading the way. In a recent interview with Energy-Storage.News, he also said,
“By mid-2018, India will have over 1GWh of li-ion battery pack manufacturing capacity. We also anticipate that in 2018 at least two li-ion cell manufacturing plants with capacity of 1GWh or more will start construction in India with anticipated completion for early 2020, bringing India on the global map of ‘Gigafactories’.”
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