Asked to set the scene for batteries in India, Debmalya Sen answers in three words. We are nowhere.
The figure he reaches for is installed storage capacity: around 0.2 GWh, on a grid of more than 400 GW. That, he says, is nothing, and he says it twice. The comparison he has in mind is China, Australia and the United States, and how they have been getting it done.
What makes the number worth reporting is the one sitting next to it.
Six years to get from 0.2 to more than 200
India has a target of 500 GW of non-fossil generation by 2030. To take that much onto the grid sustainably, the country's own estimate is that it will need roughly 42 GW of battery storage at five hours duration, which works out at about 208 GWh, alongside some 19 GW of pumped hydro.
So the ask is a move from 0.2 GWh to more than 200 GWh by 2030. Six years. Sen calls it a huge ask and does nothing to soften it.
His argument is that India came to storage late and then picked up pace quickly, and that the pace arrived through policy before it arrived through construction. On the demand side he lists energy storage obligations, waivers on interstate transmission system charges, and viability gap funding for stationary storage systems, intended to bring the cost down and accelerate deployment. On the supply side, domestic manufacturing promoted through production-linked incentive schemes.
The tender book is the evidence
The result shows up in tendering, which has picked up over the past two years.
Last year set a record at 25 energy storage-linked tenders. At the time of recording the count already stood at 23, with three months of the year still to run, which Sen expects will make it the best year yet for storage in India. On batteries specifically, around 16 GWh of tenders had been issued, 13 GWh of that in the current year alone. Standalone storage is not the whole of it: renewables-plus-storage tenders add a further opening.
Costs have come down globally, and India's levelised cost of storage has come down with them.
The change Sen seems more interested in is the clock. The turnaround from a tender being issued, to being awarded, to construction actually starting has shortened significantly this year. For a market with that much to build in six years, the timeline matters as much as the volume.
Seventy-four per cent of tenders buy the same thing
On that point he is sharpest.
Batteries elsewhere tend to earn their first revenue from power applications, frequency regulation and ancillary services, and move on to energy applications once that market saturates. India skipped the first step, and Sen's word for that is a leapfrog. It was not really a choice. The reason is market design rather than ambition: the ancillary market in India is not well developed, or as he puts it, not conducive enough for batteries to participate in it.
So the assets went straight to energy applications, and almost all of them to a single one. Of all tenders issued to date, 74% address peak management. Around 15% covers diesel generator offset. The rest sits under other uses. The typical contract asks the asset to hold a peak guarantee for four hours, or two.
Prices have fallen, though Sen credits the global oversupply for that rather than anything India has done.
His interest is in what the single use case leaves unclaimed. If revenue streams from the same asset could be better multi-stacked, both the cost and the returns improve. That is where he places the opportunity, and it is a question about how the market is built rather than about the hardware in it.
Two- and three-wheelers got there first, chargers did not
On the mobility side, India is one of the leading markets in the world for two- and three-wheelers, and Sen describes the penetration in that segment as noteworthy. Subsidy did the early work. In certain aspects the segment has now reached price parity with internal combustion.
Passenger vehicles have not done the same, though he sees a bit of traction appearing. Buses have moved, again with government support, initially through the FAME schemes.
Then a shift he dates to the last year, and treats as consistent with the global mood: the stationary storage market has taken the limelight.
Charging is the part he calls one of the critical bottlenecks. Guidelines for charging infrastructure were missing and have only recently been published, with a target for chargers within a set radius in urban and rural settings alike. The government is backing battery swapping alongside plug-in charging rather than picking one model over the other. His assessment of progress is slowly improving, not very fast.
What India has to export is the paperwork
Asked what other regions could take from India, Sen does not name a technology or an incentive. He names the tendering and approval process.
He sets it against the American interconnection queue, which he puts at 18 months and sometimes 24. India's record on getting a tender from conception to award, and from award into construction, is in his account a genuine achievement, and one that gets put in front of US counterparts in World Economic Forum sessions. The thing India has to offer, on his account, is the administration rather than the engineering.
Traffic in the other direction, he says, should carry two things.
The first is research and development, where he sees potential in India that is not being used to anything like its full extent. His comparison is China, and his explanation of why China is China is not a matter of policy design but of the sheer amount that has been invested.
The second is the talent pool. India has a lot of talent and a lot of opportunities arriving, and the question Sen leaves open is whether there will be enough trained people to meet those opportunities when they land.
This piece draws on the full conversation, which is available with a complete transcript on the episode page.