NEW DELHI: As part of India’s green energy push, the government is working on an Energy Storage policy for large scale integration of renewable energy with the country’s power system.

There is a growing traction for hydropower projects among Indian clean energy majors. Large storages can help keep India’s power grids stable, given electricity is produced intermittently from clean energy sources such as solar and wind. The idea is to use cheap green power during off-peak hours to raise water to a height and then release it into a lower reservoir to generate electricity.

The union power ministry has invited “suggestions with regard to formulation of comprehensive policy framework and recommend other interventions to promote energy storage in power sector."

India has crossed 100 gigawatt (GW) of installed solar and wind capacity, with another 63GW under construction. The plan is to have 175GW renewable energy capacity by 2022 and 450GW by 2030. This huge injection of electricity in the grid from sources such as solar and wind requires a storage mechanism that can help balance the national electricity grid.

A 6 October public notice from the ministry said, “Government of India intends to bring out a comprehensive policy on energy storage in power sector. The policy would broadly focus on regulatory, financial and taxation, demand management and technological aspects in order to speed up the implementation of storage capacity driven by the need to have increased flexibility in Indian power system to absorb the large scale integration of the renewable energy into the system during the coming years."

India plans to shortly come out with a policy to promote hydro pump storage schemes with around 96 GW identified as a potential capacity for the same.

“India is on track to achieve 450 GW - installed capacity from renewable energy by 2030," the power ministry said in a tweet on Monday night.

This comes at a time when India plans to set up a 14 gigawatt-hour (GWh) grid-scale battery storage system at the world’s largest renewable energy park at Khavda in Gujarat and also plans to invite bids for the largest global tender for setting up a 13GWh grid-scale battery storage system in Ladakh.

The government also plans to call bids for setting up around 4GWh of the grid-scale battery storage system at the regional load dispatch centres. In addition, state-run NTPC Ltd has floated a global tender for setting up 1GWh grid-scale battery storage system. According to CEA, there will be a need for 27GW of grid-scale battery energy storage systems by 2030 with four hours of storage.

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