India Boosts Battery Investment to Cut Solar Power Waste

Solar power developers in India have started to add battery storage to photovoltaic projects to attract buyers and reduce the large share of curtailments for power supply that the grids are unable to absorb, Santosh Sarangi, Secretary of India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, said on Friday.

As much as 42 gigawatts (GW) of solar projects are still struggling to find offtakers, with about 18 GW of solar-only projects without batteries most at risk of continuing to struggle, Sarangi said at the BNEF Summit in New Delhi, as carried by Bloomberg. Moreover, another up to 15 GW in total projects awarded at high prices also risk failing to secure buyers, according to the official.

Without battery backup, solar projects see curtailments during the hottest months and peak daytime hours.

India’s electricity grid is expanding at a slower pace than the boom in renewable energy installations, leading to an increased share of clean energy curtailments and threatening to slow the solar and wind boom in the world’s most populous country.

Grid and transmission constraints accounted for nearly two-thirds of all renewable energy curtailment at 300 gigawatt-hours (GWh) in the first quarter of the year, clean energy think tank Ember said in a report in May.

In a separate analysis in June, Ember said that India needs around 10 GWh of battery storage immediately to stop renewable energy curtailment when the coal fleet cannot ramp down below its technical minimum.

“Without sufficient flexibility, including storage, this could become a constraint on the next phase of renewable energy growth,” said the report’s author, Neshwin Rodrigues, Senior Energy Analyst at Ember.

Between April and June, the hottest months of the year in India, the national grid wasted 11% of the solar power output even as electricity demand jumped to a new record high. The national grid failed to absorb 8 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of solar energy compared to 63 billion kWh that reached the grid, said Shripad Yesso Naik, Minister of State in the New and Renewable Energy Ministry.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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