The world is at the cusp of a 21st century industrial revolution, of which energy storage will be at the epicentre, according to Dr Rahul Walawalkar, president, India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA). “There is a lot of innovation taking place in the energy storage ecosystem. India presents a significant opportunity of stationary energy storage technologies,” he says while summing up the key discussions and insights at a global conference and expo which IESA organised virtually to bring together industry leaders, policymakers, academia, researchers, and professionals and deliberate on the need to nurture a global ecosystem for energy storage. The 75-plus experts who participated in the event, organised to celebrate the fourth World Energy Storage Day on 22 September, deliberated upon the policy, technology, and business landscape across the world. They emphasised the importance of policy incentives, business leadership, skilled workforce, and inter-industry collaboration to make India Atmanirbhar in energy storage, and urged policymakers and business leaders to take ‘bold steps’ tobuild local capacity for this. The participants discussed four critical aspects of the energy storage ecosystem: policy and government initiatives, stationary energy storage, e-mobility and the latest innovations and developments in the sector.While the significance of energy storage as an integral part of the electrical grid has been acknowledged by several stakeholders, including large consumers, renewable developers, utilities, grid-system operators and regulators, the Government of India has set a target of installing 175 Gigawatt (GW) of renewable energy capacity by 2022 and 450 GW by 2030. A large proportion of this capacity will come from hybrid projects, where energy storage will play a key role.
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The conference marked the importance of energy storage as part of industrial progress and sustainable lives
