India is undergoing a clean energy transition. The government is consistently implementing policies to increase the share of renewables in the total electricity mix. Solar energy, in the form of rooftop and utility-scale solar, is at the forefront with significant capacity addition over the past decade. The cumulative solar capacity has grown from 3 MW in 2009 to 31 GW as of September 2019 and is aimed to reach 100 GW by 2022. 1 Energy storage is also garnering much attention with the growing share of renewable energy in the grid to overcome generation intermittency. The Union Cabinet recently approved the National Mission on Transformative Mobility and Battery Storage that includes a five-year phased manufacturing programme to set up large-scale battery and cell manufacturing Giga plants in India.
Since then, several renewable plus storage tenders have been announced. The share of solar plus storage projects is only going to increase as India moves towards achieving the 100 GW target. In additional to lead-acid batteries, which have been in use for energy storage and uninterrupted power supply solutions for many decades, alternative battery chemistries such as lithium and redox flow are emerging for renewable energy applications.
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RENEWABLE ENERGY TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT
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