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There has been a trend toward renewable energy as the worldwide focus on climate change has intensified. India, too, is steadily moving away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources. India has an ambitious goal of obtaining 40% renewable installed capacity by 2030, energy storage appears to be the key to unlocking renewable energy’s actual potential and reaching this goal. In India, energy storage is gaining traction in both the conventional and renewable energy sectors. Energy storage systems have a lot of applications and benefits; thus they have a lot of potential in the Indian renewable energy market.
Ways In Which Energy Storage Contributes
The term “energy storage” usually refers to the process of storing previously generated electric energy for subsequent use. Depending on the type of stored energy, energy storage systems come in a variety of shapes and sizes, including batteries with capacities ranging from 100 to 200 megawatts, pumped storage hydropower with capacities ranging from 250 to 1000 megawatts, flywheels with capacities ranging from 10 to 20 megawatts, and pressurized gas storage systems with capacities ranging from 0-180 megawatts. Energy storage systems help minimize schedule deviation by bridging the gap between demand and supply of electricity and hence increases reliability and effectiveness. Improved ways for storing and dispatching electricity would allow for greater use of renewable energy while ensuring high electric supply reliability.
Benefits
During outages, energy storage can supply backup power. The same principle applies to backup power for a single item such as a smoke alarm that plugs into a wall but also has a battery backup that may be applied to an entire building or the entire grid. Storage allows the grid to be more flexible, ensuring that users have access to power whenever and wherever they need it. Both reliability and resilience rely on this flexibility. As the cost of outages continues to climb, the benefit of increased reliability and resilience rises as well. Energy storage allows for the storing of electricity for later use when and where it is most needed. The electric grid gains efficiencies and capacities as a result, including the ability to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Energy storage can assist integrate more solar, wind, and distributed energy resources into the grid by adding flexibility to the grid. It can also enhance grid efficiency by boosting the capacity factor of current resources, reducing the need for new polluting peak power plants to be built. By storing excess energy while the wind is blowing and the sun is shining and delivering it when the reverse is happening, energy storage can smooth out the delivery of variable or intermittent resources like wind and solar. Storage, on the other hand, can help with the effective distribution of electricity from inflexible baseload supplies. When demand fluctuates rapidly and demands flexibility, energy storage can inject or remove electricity as required to precisely meet the load requirements wherever and whenever it is necessary.
Future Potential
The International Energy Agency (IEA) highlighted India’s potential to become a “world leader” in battery storage in its India Energy Outlook 2021 published last month, predicting that the country could add 140GW-200GW of battery capacity by 2040, the most of any country and more than 100 times the amount installed in the United States today. By 2040, India is expected to be one of the world’s top locations for energy storage projects.
This forecast excludes India’s growing usage of electric vehicles. By 2032, India’s total energy demand for all major uses will be roughly 2,400 GWh. The demand for energy storage technology in 2018 was estimated to be at 23 GWh. By 2023, it is expected that more than double this quantity will be necessary to complete the planned EV changeover. The Indian government has set lofty goals for both EVs and renewable energy: by 2030, 30% of all vehicles sold will be electric, and renewable energy will account for 40% of overall energy generation. India will require more battery storage than any other country in the world to meet these goals.
Conclusion
Energy storage lets our energy supply mix develop more simply and reliably as our energy supply mix becomes cleaner with low- and no-carbon resources. The state is now warming up to welcome the wave of opportunities. India’s goal should be to plan ahead of time and be ready to surf the wave of energy storage when it comes.
