India will increase its renewable energy storage capacity to 6GW by FY28: Report

New Delhi: India’s renewable energy (RE) storage capacity is expected to surge 6GW by fiscal 2028 from less than 1GW operational as of March 2024.

This surge is driven by a robust pipeline of projects under implementation and expected healthy pace of auctions, a report said on Wednesday.

According to the Crisil Ratings, "Storage is becoming crucial with the rising share of RE — both solar and wind — in the overall power generation mix. This is because RE generation by nature is concentrated, happening at specific times in a day. For instance, solar generation happens largely during daytime. Such a generation profile does not match with demand that typically peaks in the morning and evening."

To address this issue, the government is working on developing the infrastructure needed through standalone storage systems (such as pumped hydro or battery storage systems) and storage-linked projects that combine RE generation with storage, the report said.

The auctions of such projects have been ramped up.

About 3GW of standalone storage and approximately 10GW of storage-linked projects with about 2GW of storage were auctioned in the past two fiscals (vs less than 1GW previously), resulting in a healthy pipeline of about 6GW of storage as of May 2024.

Manish Gupta, Senior Director, CRISIL Ratings, said, “However, progress on implementation has been tardy. Slow adoption by state distribution companies (discoms) has been a key deterrent to implementation — 60-65 per cent of such projects had not got their power purchase agreements (PPAs) executed until May 2024.”

The government aims to increase RE capacity to 450GW by 2030 from 130GW as of March 2024.

To promote this, Renewable Purchase Obligations (RPOs) have been stipulated for discoms.

They must increase the share of RE power from about 25 per cent at present to 39 per cent by fiscal 2028.

This means discoms will need to buy more RE power and as its penetration increases, focus will sharpen on storage essential for grid balancing.