India continues to ramp up interest in ESS technology

India signalled its growing interest in energy storage systems during a week when its prime minister visited Tesla and a firm unveiled a new lead-acid battery.

During a tour of the US firm’s automotive campus, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi showed interest in Tesla’s Powerwall, especially for India’s remote rural areas.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs said the main takeaway was the technology behind long-term storage batteries, and Modi had been ‘very keen’ to see how India could use the battery technology to ‘leapfrog development in India’, claimed the website.

Tesla began shipping its 7kWh Powerwalls to pilot customers in North America, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Australia this week.

Meanwhile Relicell has launched a proprietary gel-based maintenance-free battery, designed for renewable energy storage, especially for home use in India’s punishing weather conditions.

Relicell is the battery brand of Greenvision Technologies, an energy storage solutions firm headquartered in Bangalore, India.

The batteries use a lead-calcium-tin-silver alloy, a synthetic separator with phosphoric acid added to the electrolyte to improve life cycle.

The batteries are available in 12V, 35 Ah to 12V and 200 Ah options and come in three variants: Solar Gel for solar applications, Ultra Gel for home inverters and deep cycle UPS applications.

Founder and Managing Director of Greenvision Technologies Biju Bruno said: "The largest adoption of these batteries is likely to be in home inverters and solar energy storage devices, while batteries used to store solar energy will be able to operate under very hot conditions and even in a state of partial charge."

Back in August ACME Cleantech Solutions launched the first power back-up storage solution in India. The lithium-ion-based EcoGrid Energy Storage System was designed for homes and small commercial units.

At the start of the year, US energy storage system developer SunEdison moved into the Indian market when it bought 1,000 Imergy Power Systems ESP 30 systems.

SunEdison bought the vanadium flow battery technology to build microgrids to store solar energy in rural India. SunEdison aims to develop 5,000 microgrids by 2020 to store solar energy for 20 million people, with the first 1,000 to be developed within three years.