China's Envision Group is exploring the possibility of setting up a battery manufacturing plant in India, looking to tap into the country’s rapid push to modernise its grid and integrate more renewable energy.
According to Bloomberg, Suman Nag, Envision's global head for contracts, said the company is evaluating a 5 GWh-a-year, $34 million facility, which would assemble battery systems using cells sourced from China while developing racks and software locally.
“As an Indian subsidiary of a Chinese company, we’ll be happy to localise,” Nag said. “Just passing the equipment through our books and counting it as sales adds no value to our company in India,” he added, stating that he expects Envision to reach a decision within 18 months, depending on how quickly the storage market develops.
India’s renewable energy expansion is increasingly constrained by the shortage of storage solutions needed to stabilize electricity flows. Grid operators are frequently forced to curtail excess solar energy that could otherwise be stored during the day and supplied at night.
“There’s a lot that a battery can do in India today,” Nag said, noting that they “are currently trying to do grid frequency management from our coal plants, which take hours to ramp up and ramp down. Batteries can do that job in milliseconds.”
Although India currently has less than 1 gigawatt of battery storage capacity, analysts expect the market to surge to 46 gigawatts by 2032.
Nag also cautioned against inexperienced companies bidding aggressively in storage tenders. He pointed to a recent Rajasthan auction where winners included a consumer goods firm and a company known for selling packaged basmati rice.
“We’ll need to see whether these players are backed up with techno-commercial capability to actually get those projects built,” he said.
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