Ankit Mittal has a dream that’s already beginning to come true. For starters, he wants to turn every kirana store into a swapping station for electric vehicle batteries. In another innovative move, his company, Sheru, is linking up the batteries so they can store power from the utilities and sell it back to them at peak consumption times when demand is high and solar energy and wind production is intermittent. It’s already running a pilot scheme selling electricity to giant BSES.

With India’s huge growth plans for the renewable-energy sector, power storage is where EV batteries neatly come into play. While EVs are still a long way from taking over Indian roads, they’re gaining ground rapidly and a huge, hard-driving industry has already sprung up around them so the potential is there for what’s called the “vehicle-to-grid system” to help balance power supply and demand.

Look at Hyderabad-based RACEnergy, which has just built its own battery plant that can manufacture 30,000 batteries a year for two-wheelers and three-wheelers. By 2025, it hopes to cater to 80,000 vehicles. RACEnergy founder Arun Sreyas says the company wanted to ensure top-notch battery quality and figured early on at the start of the decade it should make its own. “Batteries are sensitive to a lot of things like temperatures, currents, voltages and humidity,” says Sreyas.

Sheru has about 600 battery swapping operators in Delhi already and, in the next two years, aims to scale that up by five times in Delhi alone and also expand by almost the same number elsewhere. Aside from supplying power to BSES Rajdhani, it’s in talks with other private energy-generating companies like CESC, Tata Power and Torrent. Supplying power to PSUs involves more complex formalities such as obtaining certain licences so that will likely happen only at a later stage.

Already, Mittal reckons India requires some 20 gigawatt-hours of energy storage and 80 per cent of that is needed for intra-day management when renewable energy generation is variable The renewable energy sector is expected to grow rapidly and the electric-vehicle segment is also expected to boom. By 2030, India will need about 260-gigawatt hours of energy storage capacity, Mittal calculates.

Mittal adds that India has to perforce go green because otherwise, as economic growth ramps up, the level of emissions will rise to further unacceptable levels. But building back-up facilities is a very low-margin game for the power utilities. And that’s where he steps into the picture because he can store the power at no extra cost. Says Mittal: “We’re aggregating batteries at our swapping stations instead of the power companies “having to build dedicated infrastructure.”

Target segment

India is unlike other countries in that the bottom-end of the market has been the first to go electric. Both Sheru and RACEnergy are aiming particularly at the three-wheeler segment where battery-swapping is likely to be popular, firstly because it can keep vehicle costs down. Sreyas says it’s specifically the cargo three-wheelers that have become early adopters because they see a cost advantage. In cities like Delhi, passenger autorickshaws are also starting to go electric. Says Mittal: “These guys are adopting two-wheelers and three-wheelers, not because of the green narrative but because there’s a cost benefit.”

RACEnergy is also tying up with delivery company Hala Mobility which is putting 2,000 electric two-wheelers on the road starting this month. All the two-wheelers will use RACEnergy’s batteries. RACEnergy currently has tie-ups with Hindustan Petroleum and Bharat Petroleum and has 17 battery swapping stations at these two companies’ Hyderabad outlets. The batteries weigh 9 kg and most swapping stations are unmanned. Sreyas reckons it takes about two minutes to swap batteries and that includes payment time.

At a different level, Sheru will work with Zingbus, which is looking at running inter-city buses and also electric taxis. Sheru will establish its charging points at Zing’s bus depots for its electric fleet. It also has ambitious plans which are still at the discussion stage to move into electricity storage linked to rooftop solar. The banking sector, for instance, has a huge corpus earmarked for rooftop solar and Mittal is already talking to some banks. Mittal also says even though the plant-load factor of solar energy is quite low, per-unit production cost is already cheaper than coal.

Both Sheru and RACEnergy are operating in an industry where change is a constant and technological breakthroughs are always happening. But they’re looking to stay in the fast lane and out in front on the road to a new world of electric mobility.

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