Tata Power Delhi Distribution (TPDDL) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the financial arm of the World Bank Group, have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to assess the energy storage capacity requirement in TPDDL’s area for ensuring sustainable and reliable power distribution and to strategize energy storage deployment in the electric utilities.

Tata Power-DDL is a joint venture between Tata Power and the Government of Delhi. It distributes electricity in North Delhi and serves a populace of 7 million spread across the capital.

Over the next eight months, the two organizations will jointly conduct a study in South Asia to examine and recommend the optimum energy storage capacity that can be implemented for Tata Power-DDL’s 2,000 MW distribution system. Based on the results, an assessment will be made on the storage potential in other smart cities.

“Today, battery storage has become a crucial part of the electricity grid for the adoption of renewable energy sources and to meet the ever-increasing demand. The association with IFC will help us in leveraging storage optimally and further strengthening our network performance to provide quality power supply to our consumers,” said Sanjay Banga, CEO, TPDDL.

With electric mobility poised to burgeon, the demand for stable and high-quality energy storage system is increasing.

In July 2019, Mercom had reported that the National Electric Mobility Mission Plan (NEMMP) 2020 targets the deployment of up to 7 million hybrid and electric vehicles (EVs) in India by 2020.

According to the company’s statement, “During a typical day in 2022, solar power may meet up to 44% of the total power demand. Also, the wind capacity of 60 GW may bring about a variation of up to 8 GW in as little as five hours. This variability and uncertainty will require enough response capability to accommodate sudden drops in output, which can only happen with effective and viable storage systems.”

Recently, Energy Vault, an Idea lab company that has developed a transformative technology to store energy raised $110 million in Series B funding. The investment was made by SoftBank Vision Fund, which was its first investment in energy storage technology. In November 2018, Tata Power announced that it would deploy a 35 MWh Energy Vault system by 2019. The energy storage technology is expected to significantly lower the cost per kilowatt-hour and high round trip efficiency and claims to have a 30-40-year life without any degradation in the storage capacity.

On a similar note, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) recently issued invitations requesting proposals to develop gravity storage projects and also to utilize solar to produce hydrogen from seawater. The ministry believes that with the increasing share of renewables in the country, there will soon be a requirement for energy storage to absorb fluctuations and for grid balancing.

“Optimizing storage and peak load management will benefit the 1.7 million consumers in Tata Power-DDL’s area. It will also reduce the company’s cost by enabling it to buy cheaper power during off-peak hours and distributing it when the demand is higher,” the statement from Tata Power further adds.

Tata Power has also announced in the past that it would not build any new coal-fired power projects and most of its power capacity expansion will take place through renewable energy.

Image Credit: Amazon AWS