BHEL to be awarded rare tender for battery energy storage system under TERI consortium project

Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL) emerged as best supplier of battery and associated equipment in a tender recently floated by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) for installation and maintenance of battery energy storage systems (BESS). BHEL has offered 410 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.

This level of interest from prestigious organisations in the tender signifies the transition of electricity distribution grid with increasing penetration of distributed energy resources supported by stationary battery energy storage technologies.

TERI – under the licensee area of BSES Rajdhani Power Limited (BRPL) – is implementing a pilot project to integrate Battery Energy Storage Systems (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 bi-lateral consortium of 30 collaborating entities, led in India by Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur and by Washington State University (WSU) in the USA (https://uiassist.org/)

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 NCT of Delhi (https://www.teriin.org/announcements). An important objective of this project is to bridge the gap between smart grid, storage, and renewable energy research and facilitate its subsequent adoption by distribution 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. 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 minimising electricity cost,” said Dr Ajay Mathur, Director General, TERI.

“We are delighted that BHEL has come out as the best supplier of battery and associated equipment in this tender. Most of the systems and components are domestically manufactured, and this tender suggests that there is a large potential of growth of this domestic industry,” said A K Saxena, Senior Fellow & Senior Director, Electricity & Fuels Division, TERI.

“This tender holds special importance as it identifies appropriate technologies as per techno-economic evaluation and validates their technical characteristics under Indian environmental conditions. Further, it gathers data to explore more opportunities for BESS in managing variability of demand and supply at electricity distribution level. It also states a suitable step-by-step process to evaluate a technology as nascent as battery energy storage,” said Alekhya Datta, Fellow and Area Convenor, Electricity and Fuels Division, TERI.

So far, there has been no descriptive tender of BESS at distribution level. This tender not only briefly explains applications and control logic for BESS to operate but is also technologically neutral.

One of the outcomes of the project is to identify most suitable technology of stationary battery storage at electricity distribution level and the tender allowed bidders to bid in multiple technologies.

“The unique way of evaluation with 70% technical weightage and no concept of L1 bidder sets it apart from other tenders of BESS at distribution level. If we compare the tender against recent tenders of similar ticket size, the response received is overwhelming,” said Ashish Kumar Sharma, Research Associate, TERI.

Under this tender, the bidder was expected to have installed and operationalized BESS of cumulative installed capacity of 125 kW for two hours or higher, of which at least one grid-interactive BESS would be of 30 kW for two hours capacity or higher (in India or globally).