The government announced Tuesday that it will bring out a battery swapping policy in addition to formulating interoperability standards for EV batteries — a move aimed at making electric vehicles more viable and reducing range anxiety for potential buyers. The government also gave infrastructure sector status to energy storage systems.
This was a part of the 2022-23 Union Budget’s focus on sunrise opportunities, energy transition and climate action.
“Considering the constraint of space in urban areas for setting up charging stations at scale, a battery swapping policy will be brought out and inter-operability standards will be formulated. The private sector will be encouraged to develop sustainable and innovative business models for ‘Battery or Energy as a Service’. This will improve efficiency in the EV eco- system,” Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in her speech for the Union Budget 2022-23.
The move to come out with a policy on battery swapping is essentially an extension of the government’s scheme for e-buses to swap drained batteries with fully-charged ones at depots across key metros, as a part of its ambitious plan for a mass shift to electric vehicles by the year 2030.
With battery swapping, owners of EVs will be able to swap their drained batteries with charged ones at designated stations. This eases the use of such vehicles, which otherwise take hours to recharge.
While some players have, on earlier occasions, flagged concerns with battery swapping for larger vehicles such as buses, there has already been adoption of battery swapping technology for two-wheelers. Last year, Jio-BP — the joint-venture between Reliance Industries and BP — announced the setting up of a network of EV charging stations and battery swap stations. E-mobility company Bounce also announced more than 3,500 battery swapping stations across 10 cities.
The government’s move to assign infrastructure status to the clean energy storage sector is expected to help the sector access credit. “Data Centres and Energy Storage Systems including dense charging infrastructure and grid-scale battery systems will be included in the harmonized list of infrastructure. This will facilitate credit availability for digital infra and clean energy storage,” Sitharaman said.
The Economic Survey called for focus on building storage for intermittent electricity generation from solar PV and wind farms. In addition to this, the Budget also proposed an additional Rs 19,500 crore for a production linked incentive scheme in the solar sector for manufacturing of high efficiency modules, to facilitate domestic manufacturing for the goal of 280 GW of installed solar capacity by 2030.
Source: indianexpress.com
