After a blank 1 September, the feeds picked up again: two real storage projects moved forward, and the rest of the week was commentary pointing at the same structural gap — India can assemble batteries faster than it can make the cells inside them. For the running list of live opportunities see our tender tracker.
Storage projects and awards
The two items that carry hard numbers both came from developers rather than procurers — a reminder that not every megawatt-hour of Indian storage arrives through a public tender.
- Bondada Engineering sets up subsidiary for 225 MW/450 MWh BESS project in Andhra Pradesh — pv magazine India · read our brief
- Waaree Energies wins 700 MW solar-plus-storage project from SECI, plans $37 million Arizona factory upgrade — pv magazine India · read our brief
Bondada’s 450 MWh over 225 MW is a two-hour system — peaking duty, sized for the evening ramp rather than overnight cover — and the separate subsidiary is the ring-fenced structure lenders now expect before they will underwrite a battery on its own cashflows. Waaree’s award is stated in solar megawatts with no battery rating disclosed, so its storage block is still an open question; what it does confirm is that SECI is buying firmed solar as the default product, the procurement logic set out in our guide to SECI standalone storage tenders.
Manufacturing and technology
Three separate pieces landed on the same argument this week, which is unusual enough to be worth reading together.
- “India must focus on domestic manufacturing across battery technologies,” say industry experts — pv magazine India
- India’s Clean Energy Manufacturing Boom Faces an R&D Reality Check — Mercom India
- World EV Day: Making electric mobility affordable, one battery cell at a time — pv magazine India
The common thread is chemistry breadth and research depth, not assembly capacity. Pack assembly and system integration scale quickly; cell chemistry, electrode processing and the qualification cycles behind them do not, and that gap is what the PLI scheme for ACC battery manufacturing was designed to close. For a buyer specifying a system today it has a practical consequence: cell origin, warranty backing and second-source availability deserve as much scrutiny in the bid evaluation as the headline ₹/kWh.
Other tenders and grid context
Smaller public tenders and the wider capacity picture, none of them storage-specific but all of them part of the same procurement pipeline.
- GETCO Floats Tenders for 1.04 MW Rooftop Solar Projects — Mercom India
- West Bengal Floats O&M Tender for 8.42 MW Rooftop Solar Projects — Mercom India
- Surat Municipal Corporation Invites Bids to Set Up 4.2 MW Wind Project — Mercom India
- India’s installed renewable energy capacity crosses 290 GW, experts urge focus on green skills — pv magazine India
Crossing 290 GW of installed renewables is the backdrop to every storage tender on this page: the more variable generation the grid carries, the harder it becomes to balance without batteries, and the faster state frameworks have to catch up — the position we track state by state in our India BESS policy overview.
Tender terms and deadlines change by notification — always verify the current bid documents on the issuing organisation’s portal before acting.
Weighing a bid on one of the projects above, or sizing storage for your own site? Run the numbers with our BESS savings calculator, or talk to our team for a project-specific read.