Most industrial loads have an off switch. A cold store does not.
A potato chamber in Agra, a banana ripening unit in Jalgaon, a marine processing plant in Veraval, a milk chilling centre in Anand — every one of them runs compressors through the night, through Sunday, and through the monsoon. The load barely changes between two in the afternoon and two in the morning. That single fact shapes everything about how these businesses experience electricity, and it is why storage fits them so neatly.
It also explains why the sector is unusually exposed to two things at once: the price of power, because it buys so much of it, and the reliability of power, because a few hours above temperature can write off a chamber’s worth of stock.
Why electricity dominates the cost sheet
A cold store is, in effect, a machine for moving heat out of a box and rejecting it outside. It runs continuously because heat leaks in continuously — through walls, through the floor, every time a door opens, and from the produce itself, which respires and generates its own heat.
Indicative figures circulating in the sector put a bulk cold store at roughly 70 to 80 kWh per tonne of throughput, rising toward 150 kWh per tonne for hub-type facilities with high turnover and frequent door openings. Treat those as orders of magnitude rather than design numbers — the actual figure depends on commodity, temperature band, insulation age and how disciplined your door practice is. But the shape of the conclusion holds: electricity is usually the largest controllable operating cost in the business, ahead of labour.
That matters because of something that changed recently in how Indian power is priced.
Time-of-day pricing landed on a flat load
The Electricity (Rights of Consumers) Amendment Rules, 2023 made time-of-day (ToD) tariffs mandatory rather than optional. Two provisions are the ones to know:
- For commercial and industrial consumers with maximum demand above 10 kW, ToD was to take effect no later than 1 April 2024.
- For other consumers except agricultural consumers, no later than 1 April 2025. Where a smart meter is installed, ToD applies immediately.
And the rates are not symmetric decoration. The peak-period tariff set by the State Commission must be at least 1.20 times the normal tariff for commercial and industrial consumers, and at least 1.10 times for others — while the solar-hour rate is set below the normal tariff.
Now put a cold store into that structure. Its load is close to flat, so it buys a roughly equal amount of energy in every band — including the most expensive one. A factory that works one shift can simply avoid the evening peak. A cold store cannot. It has no shift to move.
The battery does not change how much energy the store consumes. It changes when that energy was bought. Charge in the green window, discharge in the red one, and the same cooling is delivered at a lower average cost per unit. We set out how these windows are structured, state by state, in time-of-day tariffs in India.
The four things a battery actually earns here
It helps to separate these, because they are sized differently and they are not equally valuable at every site.
1. Energy shifting against the ToD spread. The mechanism above. Its value is the peak-to-solar gap on your tariff multiplied by the energy you can move, minus the round-trip losses — a battery gives you back roughly 85 to 90 per cent of what you put in, so a narrow spread can be eaten entirely by losses. This is arithmetic you can do from your own bill.
2. Demand charge reduction. Most Indian industrial tariffs bill a fixed charge on your highest recorded demand in the month, not just on energy consumed. Cold stores set painful peaks: compressors restarting together after an outage, or the whole plant pulling hard during a pull-down after a fresh intake. A battery that covers those short spikes lowers the recorded maximum demand for the entire billing period. We cover the mechanics in demand charges explained.
3. Displacing diesel. This is often the largest single number. Diesel-generated power in India typically costs several times the grid rate per unit once fuel, maintenance and top-up logistics are counted, and cold stores in weak-grid districts run generators far more than their owners would like. A battery covers the short and medium outages that make up most of the year’s interruptions. The full comparison is in batteries versus diesel gensets.
4. Protecting the stock. The one that does not appear on an electricity bill and often dominates the business case anyway. A chamber that drifts out of its temperature band can lose a commercial grade or the whole consignment. A battery switches over in milliseconds — fast enough that compressors and controls do not see an interruption at all — where a generator takes tens of seconds to start and stabilise.
Agri-processing has a different shape
Cold storage and agri-processing are usually discussed together and they behave quite differently on the meter.
| Cold storage | Agri-processing (milling, ripening, dal/rice mills, oil expellers) | |
|---|---|---|
| Load shape | Nearly flat, 24 hours a year-round | Bursty, shift-based, often sharply seasonal |
| Seasonality | Chambers fill after harvest and hold for months | Concentrated into the crushing or milling season |
| Main battery value | Energy shifting and outage ride-through | Demand charge shaving and motor-starting support |
| Outage consequence | Stock spoils. Cost is the inventory | Production stops. Cost is downtime and throughput |
| Tolerance for drift | Low — temperature band is a product specification | High — a mill can simply pause |
| Typical sizing driver | Peak-window energy, or outage duration | Peak kVA, and motor inrush |
The practical implication: a processing unit can often extract most of the value from a smaller battery, because its problem is short, sharp peaks rather than continuous consumption. A cold store needs more energy for the same rupee saving, but it gets the reliability benefit that the processor does not need as badly.
Many integrated facilities are both — a pack-house with pre-cooling, cold rooms and grading lines on one connection. Those are the most interesting sites, because one battery serves both duties, and the two load shapes partly fill each other’s gaps.
Where solar fits
Cold stores are close to an ideal rooftop solar host: large shed roofs, rural locations with good irradiation, no shading, and a daytime load that already matches generation. Adding solar reduces the energy bought outright.
But solar on its own leaves the two expensive problems untouched. It generates during the discounted window, not the peak one, and it produces nothing during a night-time outage. So solar addresses the energy bill while the battery addresses the tariff structure and the reliability. Together they are a solar-plus-storage system, and the sizing question becomes how much midday generation you want to carry into the evening rather than export at a low rate.
For very small units there is a dedicated route. MNRE has issued guidelines for solar cold storage with thermal energy backup, effective from February 2025, covering capacities from 2 to 20 tonnes. These specify cold-room insulation, refrigeration unit and refrigerant, phase-change thermal energy storage with lifespan and monitoring requirements, solar PV and mounting, and a battery for auxiliary components. They mandate a pre-cooling capacity of 10 per cent of total storage capacity for two consecutive days, a five-year comprehensive maintenance period, and three tests — cooling delivery capacity, solar performance, and automatic power source switching. Note the design philosophy: for a micro cold room, the cold itself is the store, with the battery handling controls and auxiliaries. That is a sensible trade at two tonnes and a poor one at two thousand.
Where the load is farm-side rather than store-side, the parallel scheme story is on the pumping end, which we cover in solar pumps, PM-KUSUM and storage in agriculture.
What public money is available
The main instrument is the Integrated Cold Chain and Value Addition Infrastructure (ICCVAI) scheme, run by the Ministry of Food Processing Industries (MoFPI) under the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Sampada Yojana (PMKSY). Its terms:
- Grant-in-aid of 35 per cent of eligible project cost in general areas.
- 50 per cent in designated difficult areas.
- Subject to a maximum of ₹10 crore per project.
- Covering integrated cold chain, preservation and value addition infrastructure from farm gate to consumer, for non-horticulture produce, dairy, meat, poultry and marine or fish (shrimp excepted).
MoFPI has approved 372 projects under the scheme, creating 38.82 lakh metric tonnes of preservation capacity and 148.07 lakh tonnes per annum of processing capacity. Revised operational guidelines were issued in May 2025, so the current version is what to work from.
The gap the scheme is aimed at remains large. NCCD assessments have pointed to a national shortfall of roughly 35 million tonnes against a requirement of over 50 million tonnes for perishables, and NCCD has reported cold storage capacity growing at a compound annual rate of only about 2.2 per cent. Against annual perishable production in the hundreds of millions of tonnes, that is slow.
Whether energy equipment is eligible, and under which head, depends on the scheme guidelines in force and on how the project is structured. Schemes and their eligible-cost definitions change by notification — and ToD windows and multipliers are set state by state and revised in tariff orders — so verify the current guidelines with MoFPI, your State Nodal Agency and your own tariff schedule before you build a financial case around any number here.
What this means for you
If you run a cold store, start with a bill and a meter download, not a product enquiry. Three things from your own data decide everything: your ToD peak-to-solar spread in rupees per unit, your recorded maximum demand versus your average demand, and your actual diesel consumption over the last twelve months. If the spread is thin, your demand is close to flat and the grid rarely fails, a battery may not clear the bar — and you should say so before spending. If any one of those three is ugly, it usually clears comfortably. Before either, do the free thing: tighten door discipline, check insulation and door seals, and test how far your commodity will let chamber temperature drift within specification.
If you run an agri-processing unit, your number is peak kVA rather than kWh. Look for the few intervals each month that set your billed demand, and whether they come from motor starting. A relatively small battery that covers those intervals can pay back on demand charges alone, before any energy shifting. A compact outdoor cabinet such as the ADESS 250 is typically the right scale for this duty — designed to sit beside the load in a small footprint rather than requiring a substation yard.
If you are building a new facility, this is much easier to design in than to retrofit. Roof structure sized for solar, a switchboard with space and a spare breaker, cable routes, and a small outdoor pad near the panel cost very little at construction and a great deal to add afterwards. And if you are applying for PMKSY support, work out the energy scope before you file rather than after.
If you are a lender or investor looking at cold chain, treat the energy plan as a credit question. Power is the largest operating cost in the business and the least predictable, and spoilage from an outage is a real and concentrated loss event. A facility with solar, storage and a measured outage plan has a materially different risk profile from one with a diesel set and hope.
The quickest way to find out whether the numbers work for your site is to put your own tariff and load into our BESS savings calculator — and if you would rather have someone read your bill with you, talk to our team.
Scheme and tariff snapshot as of September 2026. PMKSY guidelines, MNRE specifications and state time-of-day tariff windows are revised periodically; verify current terms with MoFPI, MNRE and your distribution licensee before investment decisions.