On 3 March 2020, Dr. Nicole Glanemann from the Division Bilateral Energy Cooperation, BMWi and IGEF-SO took part in the guided tour of the battery storage facility organised by the EU-India Partnership for Clean Energy and Climate. India’s first grid-scale lithium-ion battery energy storage system is housed in the Rohini substation of the Delhi DISCOM Tata Power DDL (TPDLL) and has a maximum capacity of 10 MW and 10 MWh with option to increase it to 20 MWh within days at any time. The battery-based energy storage is regarded as a milestone for India's entire energy sector. Owned and operated by Fluence, a joint venture by Siemens and AES, the power station helps provide flexibility to the local grid mainly through frequency control. During the tour, the visitors were able to gain insights into the topics of grid stabilisation and flexibility as well as handling of peak demand by battery storage:

• Currently, the battery storage is only providing grid stabilisation and peak load management services, as the policy and regulatory regime in India still does not include all the services of battery energy storage operators to be compensated.
• With the commissioning of the battery storage, TPDDL has been able to save approximately 21 million rupees due to avoided penalties associated with the overdrawal of power during peak load conditions.
• The system has conducted trial operations for other services including frequency regulation and will soon provide those services as and when policy and regulations allow.
• Battery storage projects help defer upgrades to Transmission & Distribution (T&D) infrastructure required to address load growth and rising peak demand, congestion on the network, and reliability issues.
• The current operation of the system is governed by the power manager who manually calculates the price differential in energy and directs the battery system operator to charge or discharge the battery.

This article is based on the report on EU-India Energy Week by EU-India Clean Energy & Climate Partnership (CECP).