BHEL bags battery energy storage system order under TERI consortium project

The Energy Resource Institute (TERI) on Wednesday said state-run engineering firm BHEL has won the bid for installation and maintenance of battery energy storage systems (BESS) worth Rs 2.51 crore. "BHEL emerged as best supplier of battery and associated equipment in a tender recently floated by TERI for installation and maintenance of battery energy storage systems (BESS)," a TERI statement said.

According to the statement, BHEL has offered 410 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of cumulative battery capacity for a total cost of Rs 2.51 crore, including six years of comprehensive warranty and maintenance. There are very limited tenders of BESS in India so far and the responses to this tender have been received from reputed companies such as Larsen & Toubro, Mahindra Susten, Hero Solar, Honeywell Automation, Amara Raja, Okaya Power etc, it said.

This level of interest from prestigious organizations in the tender signifies the transition of the electricity distribution grid with increasing penetration of distributed energy resources supported by stationary battery energy storage technologies, it added. TERI – under the licensee area of BSES Rajdhani Power Ltd (BRPL) – is implementing a pilot project to integrate BESS at the distribution level.

This is being implemented under an initiative of US-India collaborative for smart distribution system with storage (UI-ASSIST), a bilateral consortium of 30 collaborating entities, led in India by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur and by Washington State University (WSU) in the USA. The tender, open for both Lithium-ion and Advanced Lead Acid companies, aimed at design, supply, testing, installation & commissioning, along with Comprehensive Annual Maintenance Contract (CAMC) for five years of BESS on turnkey basis in National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi.

An important objective of this project is to bridge the gap between smartgrid, storage and renewable energy research and facilitate its subsequent adoption by the distribution of utilities in their systems through pilots with the joint efforts of the Indo-US consortium. "These tender results are game-changing – they show that it is cost-effective for BRPL to add batteries instead of adding transformer capacity in many instances, and for housing societies to use solar-cum-battery systems for electricity supply instead of DG sets," TERI Director General Ajay Mathur said.

Mathur further said, "it also shows that if time-of-day tariffs are applicable on year-on-year basis then batteries, along with solar rooftop, are a cost-effective way of minimizing electricity cost".