Lead-acid technology – can India take the lead?

Dipak Sen Choudhury looks at India’s annual gathering of the lead‑acid community in Delhi and asks whether the country is ready to seize global leadership in lead‑acid technology.

India’s annual tryst with the lead-acid battery manufacturing industry, as well as those who are in the lead recycling business, took place in early December. This is just about the time when winter descends on Delhi, soothing the severely scalded land that has been brutalised by the preceding harsh, harsh summer! It feels a little chilly in the early evenings, making walks together a little cosier. Somehow, to this scribe, that was the exact thing that went missing at this otherwise well-attended conference. The experience felt was a little too routine, a little too much ‘as per the script’! No surprises, no new insights, no new super-speakers – all that make a conference memorable! The ‘feel-good’ factor never came.

Organised by the Indian Lead Zinc Development Association (ILZDA) this two-day event has become the only forum in the country to discuss technical challenges and developments in the field of lead-acid technology. Participation from the Indian industry is whole-hearted, with all the big names, both in battery manufacturing and lead recycling, nominating quite a few delegates each.

Overseas representation is also significant. Mark Stevenson has always been a champion of the ILZDA cause and has participated in possibly all ILZDA conferences to date. Representatives of overseas battery manufacturing and recycling equipment producers were there, as were some of the ever‑ubiquitous component and raw‑material suppliers, particularly the various additive manufacturers. CBI contributed to the conference by reading a paper, Lead-Acid BESS, presented online. The conference was otherwise well organised, with presentations made both in person and online.

Lead-acid in today’s battery industry

Before we come to some of the more interesting papers and their contents, it would be pertinent to take you through the thought process that comes to many of the industry-watcher’s minds in this context. In today’s world, the lead-acid axis is certainly Asia-centred and with China’s strategic leaning towards lithium and sodium, India should aspire to become the global technology capital for lead-acid technology. The country has a vast lead-acid manufacturing, marketing and servicing network, is nearly fully self-sufficient in terms of supply chain, and has an excellent recycling infrastructure. There is no reason why India should not aspire to be the world leader. The large companies in the country have very healthy financials to report – way beyond what the best western organisations could ever think of – and they have sufficient funds to plunge deep into development.

There is a general feeling that lead-acid is suffering from a major perception deficit vis-à-vis all other energy storage options. If that is so, then it falls to the large lead‑acid manufacturers to go flat out on perception‑building by investing in BESS installations, perhaps even within their own facilities – whether factories or local communities.

This can go a long way toward perception‑building, as well as establishing technical due diligence on the improvements made by R&D teams. There is nothing better than ‘seeing is believing’, and if large lead‑acid installations are deployed for peak‑shaving and time‑shifting alongside solar or wind, with the economics demonstrated in practice, the impact could be significant.

This would make many hours of theoretical deliberations on LCoS and cycle-life redundant as the results would be there for everyone to see. That is the spark that is missing in the Indian lead-acid community! The opportunity has come and cannot be allowed to go to waste. For the lead-acid community, this is the time to act, time to improve your products to go far past the modest performance figures with which lead-acid has been labelled for far too long, making it a non-starter for ESS application. This is the time to work and demonstrate the improvements made by taking lead-acid to the next level. There must be a buzz of excitement of new things coming from the lead-acid stable. It must happen now, otherwise, it will be too late, never to happen again. That is the anxiety!

Coming back to the conference, it was refreshing that the presentations on day one were on lead recycling and day two was kept for lead-acid battery technology. The entire lead business in the country was summarised as follows: The country has an annual gross demand of 1.5MMT of lead, of which slightly more than 1MMT of secondary is obtained from domestic sources. The rest comprises of domestic primary (0.25MMT), imported primary (0.08MMT) and imported secondary (0.12MMT). Demand for lead in India has shown staggering growth over last 25 years and is projected to grow continuously for next five years at an estimated 4–5% CAGR.

Recycling lead-acid batteries

There is a total of 675 authorised recyclers in the country with a total declared capacity of 2.1MMT per year. The country is therefore a lead exporter too, sending out both recycled pure lead as well as alloys to users across Asia, Africa and some European countries.

In the last five years, because of severe pressure from regulatory authorities and respective state pollution control boards, there has been significant drive towards adopting increasingly stringent metrics to ensure employee health and hygiene in smelting facilities. Larger smelters have state-of-the-art battery breaking to smelting equipment, mostly of European origin, and this ensures that hygiene standards are easily met. Smaller smelters have also put in extra effort to ensure that basic requirements are all complied with and, compared to what one has recently read on hygiene standards maintained in specific African facilities, Indian companies are doing quite well.

The Battery Waste Management Rules 2022 (BWMR) is landmark legislation promulgated by the Government of India, aimed at comprehensively covering the collection of end‑of‑life batteries of all types – portable, EV, SLI or industrial – from end‑users, dealers or any other storage points, and ensuring they are sent exclusively to authorised recyclers.

Land filling and incineration are banned. Every battery manufacturer, assembler and even importer must take on ‘Extended Producer Responsibility’ to collect batteries from the market, with specific collection targets set as a percentage of quantities sold a given number of years earlier. These target percentages increase annually, ensuring that the maximum number of batteries operating in the field are eventually captured at end of life and sent exclusively to authorised recyclers, who will process them efficiently and in full compliance with environmental norms.

Responsible collection

Members of the Indian smelting community who attended the ILZDA conference noted the difficulty of collection and argued that a major gap in the legislation is the placement of full collection responsibility on battery manufacturers alone, rather than on the thousands of battery dealers who often bypass returning end‑of‑life batteries to manufacturers in favour of random local recyclers. These informal operators continue to exist in large numbers across the country and are typically willing to pay more for spent batteries than organised recyclers.

The feeling is clear that unless the government expands the net to bring in dealers and resellers under the scope of EPR and make them register their old battery returns annually as a percentage of what they sold in the past, collection of spent batteries will never be comprehensive. The smelting industry desperately needs collection to improve, and the government can do a lot in this regard.

Lead-acid battery developments

Coming to the second day, when lead-acid battery developments were to be talked about, it turned out to be disappointing. Presentations on the SLI front were primarily on improving the PSoC operation capability through improvements to negatives with or without paste additives. More passenger vehicles manufactured in the country are upgrading with ISS features and the demand for ISS/EFB, both in flooded as well as AGM configuration, are increasingly in demand. It is to be seen that in a hot country like India how well the AGM survives the under-bonnet temperatures which often exceed 70°C!

The disappointment came from the ESS side. As explained earlier, one would have expected several case-studies of lead-acid installations to be reported, data to be presented bursting the myths of poor recharge efficiencies, low cycle lives of the lead-acid, and unacceptable LCoS. Surely Indian lead-acid battery manufacturers can well afford to put a dozen installations at various locations, some owned by themselves and some as demo sets gifted to various agencies? This could include utilities, both in generation and distribution, hospitals, schools, shopping malls and any other commercial location which would catch the attention of decision makers. At least it would allow the highly objectionable ‘lead-acid’ excluded clause to be removed from future RFQs (request for quotation) for ESS.

An opportunity to regain

It was left to Dr Nanjan Sugumaran, a seasoned lead-acid professional, to wage a strong protest on behalf of lead-acid by championing the cause of lead-acid tubular for renewable storage. In fact, he did make an interesting observation that the landmark IEC 61427 specification, under which millions of lead-acid systems have historically performed exceedingly well, was tweaked a bit at some point in time to make lead-acid lose its competitive performance edge vis-à-vis the newer chemistries.

True or untrue, there definitely seems an opportunity for lead-acid to regain a lot of lost space by coming up with aggressive technical marketing and for that India could be the pilot country. At the same time, it is important that a renewed drive to push the performance envelope of lead-acid is overdue. While CBI, at a global level, is trying to do exactly that, one hopes that India – being a major power now in lead-acid – rises to the occasion!