Indian firm EPAL and Swiss battery maker Leclanché are jointly investing $12 million in a lithium battery storage facility nearing completion in in Canada’s Ontario province.
The 28MW/14MWh advanced battery storage project, known as Basin 1 (6MWh) and 2 (2MWh), was built and owned by the Leclanché and Canadian developer. It is the first utility scale energy storage facility designed to improve stability on the Ontario grid, with a total investment of approximately $25m.
EPAL, a joint venture between Indian state-owned Energy Efficiency Services Limited (EESL) and UK-based EnergyPro Limited (EP), said “the partnership has strategic importance from India’s perspective”.
The Indian government recently launched an ambitious investment programme in new energy, both domestically and overseas, including plans to generate 175GW from renewable energy by 2022 in India and spending GBP155m ($203.7m) on clean energy initiatives in the UK’s public and private sectors through EPAL.
India’s acting high commissioner to the UK, Dinesh Patnaik, said: “With the ever-increasing energy consumption, technologies like battery storage will go hand in hand with efficiency to balance supply and demand. I am very hopeful that EPAL… will bring a revolution in the market with its advancement into battery storage projects.”
Leclanché CEO Anil Srivastava said: “We are exploring many additional ways to integrate Leclanché’s advanced lithium battery solutions into stationary storage systems as well as new mobility applications such as EV charging stations, full-electric buses and urban transportation systems.”
Last week, Leclanché received an order for a 15MWh (EUR 5m) battery storage project from swb, an energy services provider in Germany, to provide six battery storage containers, which interact with a swb thermal storage infrastructure to ensure cost effective grid ancillary services.
