Leading The Charge

Energy savings firm EESL is procuring electric vehicles that can be rented to the government. And it has already received bids from Tata and Mahindra

- Manu Balachandran

For a few years now, Energy Efficiency Services Limited (EESL) has made winning a habit. The Noida headquartered energy savings company, a collaboration between four public sector entities, identifies an area where energy savings are feasible, and then throws its weight behind it.

Between 2015 and now, the company has single-handedly brought about an LED lamp boom in India; prices of LED lamps have fallen from about Rs 310 to Rs 38 apiece. EESL procured bulbs en masse from private companies and sold them to state governments, effectively helping bring economies of scale and bringing down prices for consumers over time. EESL had previously done the same with fans and irrigation pumps too.

Now, the company has turned its attention to transforming one of the world’s biggest automobile markets. India aims to move completely to electric vehicles (EVs) by 2030, which will help cut the country’s oil bill by some $60 billion and reduce emissions by 37 percent.

Just as it did with the LED lamps, EESL is now procuring electric vehicles, initially to rent them to the government. The company has already received bids for 10,000 electric vehicles from Tata Motors and Mahindra, and plans to procure another 10,000 vehicles during the course of the year.

“If you look at the operational cost of electric cars and, say, you charge at about ₹8-9 per unit, the cost of operating a vehicle is less than ₹2 per kilometre compared to ₹6.5 and ₹7 for petrol and ₹5.5 and ₹6 for diesel,” Saurabh Kumar, managing director of EESL, tells Forbes India. “Even CNG is about ₹4. So there is economic viability for the consumer at large.”