BYD and SkyPower partner up in India to bid for 750MW solar with energy storage

India's SECI recently announced it would tender for solar capacity with a mandate to include energy storage. Flickr: huneycuttaddison

Canada-based renewables firm SkyPower will join China-based battery developer BYD in competitive bidding for 750MW of solar and energy storage development in India.

India’s National Solar Mission has seen multi-GW tenders for solar PV capacity completed since the summer of 2015, but news of energy storage set to be included in PV tenders only emerged this year.

Rechargeable battery and electric transport company BYD will now join SkyPower, which won solar capacity in the Indian state auctions of Madhya Pradesh and Telangana last year, to compete in Indian bids that include energy storage. The two firms signed a deal at the China-Canada Economic and Trade Cooperation Conference in China’s Guangdong province.

The two companies have not confirmed exactly which tenders they intend to compete in.

However, last February the Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI), announced it would float a tender for PV capacity within the 750MW Ananthapurama Solar Park in the Kadapa district of Andhra Pradesh including energy storage capacity. Every bidder for solar capacity in that tender will have to include a small storage system beside its PV plant, coming to a combined total of 100MW storage capacity.

Following this, SECI also invited expressions of interest for what may be India’s first utility-scale energy storage project to be combined with a solar and wind hybrid project at Rangreek in the mountainous state of Himachal Pradesh.

Storage could be a key factor in mitigating the pressure on the Indian grid brought by increasing levels of intermittent solar power production. In a blog for PV Tech this week, Jasmeet Khurana, associate director, consulting, Bridge to India, said several Indian states are likely to see curtailment of solar power in the near future and he discussed the effects of grid congestion.

BYD also recently signed up as a “preferred partner” to Abu Dhabi-headquartered Masdar, to promote battery-based energy storage and clean transport.

Tags: india, skypower, byd, seci, solar-plus-storage, energy storage, auctions, bids