Site image of the battery-based energy storage project of AES and Mitsubishi at Tata Power Delhi Distribution's Rohini substation. The 10 MW system uses the Advancion energy storage platform from Fluence, a joint venture of Siemens and AES.

India presents a potential investment opportunity of $50 billion in battery storage facilities that could help integrate renewable energy into the grid, replace polluting diesel-fueled power and boost electric mobility—Andres Gluski, CEO of American energy firm AES Corp, told Bloomberg.

“Battery-based energy storage has an essential role to play in helping India realize its vision for a more sustainable energy future,” Gluski added.

Gluski was in India to launch the country’s first 10 MW battery-storage system to support the grid in national capital New Delhi. The grid-scale battery energy storage system, at Tata Power Delhi Distribution’s Rohini substation, was built by AES in partnership with Mitsubishi Corp. for almost $9 million. It uses the Advancion energy storage platform from Fluence, a joint venture of Siemens and AES.

Significantly, India has set a 175 GW renewable power by 2022 target. However, the ability of the grid to integrate variability associated with renewables, as well as the huge investment required to upgrade the transmission and distribution (T&D) infrastructure, are the key challenges for India to meet this ambitious target.

Energy storage can help to better integrate these renewables by providing multiple values to the system, such as optimizing T&D investments, addressing forecasting errors in wind and solar generation for more accurate scheduling, addressing local reliability issues by providing reactive power support, and enabling end users to manage peak load, and more efficient utilization of distributed renewables.