Solar energy in India what lies ahead: storage?

Abstract

Over the next few years, India is looking to shift gradually from dependency on fossil fuels to reliance on renewable sources of energy. Solar energy plays an important role to achieve this goal. India, being a tropical country, has the privilege of receiving sunlight for longer hours per day and for almost 300 days in a year and with great intensity. Also, it would play a crucial role in empowering people at the grassroots level by promoting decentralized distribution of energy. Hence, it is important to use the available solar energy effectively. Almost 5,000trillion kWh per year energy is incident over India s land area with some parts receiving as much as 4-7 kWh per sq. m per day. Solar thermal and Solar photovoltaics should be harnessed effectively for conversion of solar radiation into heat and electricity. Solar energy will be especially useful in the rural areas to meet the needs for power, heating and cooling in terms of off-grid decentralized and low-temperature applications. However, constraints like availability of space pose a barrier for scalability. This is where storage comes into picture. In India, solar power is characterized by a high degree of variability, especially in the monsoon season, and effective storage is necessary to overcome this issue. Cost-effective storage technologies which could address both variability and storage constraints and also target space intensity should be the vision for the future. Utility rate structures, gradual shifts in how the utility grid is managed, maintained and upgraded, and regulatory changes are creating new applications and opportunities for photovoltaic systems with integrated storage. In fact, storage would likely become a requirement for a renewable energy production in the future. This paper is written to analyse the need for battery storage in India, batteries used in India and, future of battery storage in India and especially the source of the metals required for the manufacture of batteries and also the necessary policies for disposal/recycling of batteries. This work identifies the need for recycling of lithium-ion batteries and its challenges and hazard potential in regards to the applied materials.