New Delhi: While the ICE vehicles are transitioning to many new technologies like flex fuels, ethanol, fuel cell EV, hydrogen ICE, and electric vehicles, industry experts consider 2023 as a pivotal year for energy transition and its storage. This year, India is also expected to start its journey to Li Ion cell manufacturing.
Bala Pachayappa, Chief Executive Officer, Sodium Energy, who has been working on development and commercialisation of sodium ion technology since 2018, hopes to launch it this year.
“Sodium ion batteries can be a very good replacement for lead acid batteries. Earlier, the density of sodium ions used to be 115 Wh per kg, while today the latest one is comparable with the best of NMC chemistry. This will be a gamechanger in terms of chemistry, prices and safety. We will go into production in Q4 FY24,” he said.
The company’s batteries will not be fully indigenous this year. However, it is working on having its own anode chemistry and working with key players in China for the cathode chemistry.
Rahul Walawalkar, Managing Director, India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA), who has been working with energy storage companies for over two decades, shared that over the last 15-18 years, investment and infrastructure that has gone into Li-ion cell development has changed its applications. Then, Li ion chemistry was not considered mainstream and was used mainly for stationary power applications.
Experts believe that new technologies will be developed, but in the next 1-2 decades, new flavours of li ion batteries will also dominate the market. Similarly, lead acid batteries cannot be written off as yet as a lot of improvement is happening in lead acid on stamp grids, lead carbon, bipolar batteries etc.
“Lithium-ion batteries have taken more than 40 years to commercialize and have not yet been able to kill lead acid batteries, which has been leading for about 100 years. We need to be cautious about testing and commercializing new technologies as we may take things from a lap to a lithium-ion killer in a hurry,” Walawalkar said.
According to him, in the next few years, India may have 1 giga factory with 1 gigawatt hour production of sodium ion batteries. By 2030, 50-100 giga Wh production may be happening with new chemistries, but li-ion battery manufacturing is expected to be 5-8000 giga Wh at that time. There could be innovation even within the lithium ion batteries, as the ones which were available back in 2006 are not the ones dominating as of now.
Pankaj Sharma, co-founder & Director, Log9 Materials, believes that metal air technology is complementary to lithium- ion rather than being its antagonist. Li-ion is an energy storage while Al air is used to generate energy. You need both to work together. Theoretically Al air fuel cell can give 8000-Watt hour per kg, several times higher than the commercially available li ion which gives 250-300 water per kg.
Phinergy, an Israel cleantech firm, and the Bengaluru-based nanotechnology startup Log9 Materials are looking at commercializing their aluminium-air technology systems this year.
EV startup Ola also plans to start manufacturing local lithium- ion batteries in India in 2023.
SJ Dhinagar, Head & Senior Vice President- Vehicle Engineering, Ola Electric, said, “Currently we are consuming at the rate of quarter million cells a day, which is expected to be over a million cells a day by the end of the year.”
About the importance of data, he said that one of the critical parts of cell design is the massive 800 million km vehicle driving data and battery degradation data.
IESA wants to build on the government’s ACC-PLI scheme. It has also set its own target of India getting to at least 100-150 gWh of manufacturing capacity by 2030 and continuing to build that up to over 500 gWh by 2035. “It is expected that about 80%-90% of this will be lithium-ion, and the rest will be other alternative technologies,” Walawalkar said.
