Battery Swapping for EVs in India

India has an ambitious plan of completely electrifying its transport fleet by 2030. However, the gap between its target versus the ground reality is huge. The country barely sold 20,000 EVs last year compared to the hundreds of thousands of hybrid and electric vehicles being sold in China and USA. The charging infrastructure is almost non-existent and the choice of EVs is also extremely limited with only Mahindras selling a couple of EVs. The idea of owning an electric vehicle does not even pop-up in the thoughts of new car buyers, given the high cost and lack of an ecosystem.

While the new Indian government dispensation wants to fast forward EVs, the action on the ground is missing. Though nearly 200 EVs have been set up in Nagpur by Ola, the private market remains limited given the high cost and inconvenience. Now the government has roped in an IIT professor to help turbocharge the non-existent market. It remains to be seen if an academic can help drive the policy in the Indian system, which has innumerable difficulties and is not really amenable to bookish solutions. His agenda is also quite hard as the ministry wants to grow the market without subsidies because EVs are currently not competitive with fossil fuel vehicles and will not become so till a time range between 2022  to 2025.

The professor has come out with an idea to first set up 100 charging stations in Delhi which will swap batteries for autos and buses. According to him, this will address the biggest challenge in the adoption of EVs which is the high cost of batteries. This will lead to a much smaller charging time and also lead to high utilization. Autos and buses have been targeted first as they make limited journeys. The success of the program remains to be seen. Autorickshaws or three wheelers are notorious for their lack of respect for laws related to transport regulations and laws. They are also hardly known for their green friendliness given that they routinely use adulterated fuel to cut corners. Why these three wheelers will be at the forefront of the climate change fight beats me. Again the bus operators are known to throw climate into the bin if they can make a buck. Why would they adopt batteries and EVs

Autorickshaws or three wheelers are notorious for their lack of respect for laws related to transport regulations and laws. They are also hardly known for their green friendliness given that they routinely use adulterated fuel to cut corners. Why these three wheelers will be at the forefront of the climate change fight beats me! The bus operators could throw climate into the bin if they can make a buck. Why would they adopt batteries and EVs are again not understandable. The government should come out with better policies and regulations. They should look at other nations, adopt cheap low hanging solutions and wait for the technology to improve. By 2022, the government can go the whole hog instead of setting up a 6 million EV target by 2020. The government needs to be smart and not adopt bookish solutions.

This arrangement, Jhunjhunwala said, brings the cost of EVs (without battery) at par with conventional vehicles. By focusing on higher efficiency vehicles and batteries that can be swapped at regular intervals, the cost per kilometre can be brought down to levels comparable with diesel, petrol or CNG vehicles. Compared to larger batteries used in EVs, which typically aren’t interchangeable, these swappable batteries are smaller, cheaper, and take less time to charge. “Suddenly the whole economics was working. And once the economics work, one can scale,” he said.

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