Who leads India’s EV battery race?

The dark horse of India’s battery race is pulling away from the pack, but can it beat the bookies’ favourite?
Ola Electric Mobility Pvt, a Bengaluru-based startup, will get state support to manufacture EV batteries that can store a total of 20 gigawatt-hours of power, the government said. Reliance Industries Ltd, the country’s largest conglomerate, will get subsidies for five gigawatt-hours. The upstart is getting 40% of the total capacity covered by New Delhi’s $2.4 billion in battery incentives over five years. The plan is to shave off $33 billion from the country’s fuel-import bill.
Paying firms to play has a checkered history in India: Favoured companies invariably ask for protectionist cover. But with Brent crude oil at $120 a barrel, this particular gamble has some merit. Consumers are already shelling out too much at the pump because of high domestic taxes on gasoline and diesel. However, cutting the levies will only make the government’s pandemic-strained budget creak and groan. Hence, the desperate policy push to EVs.
There’s another goal behind giving money to battery makers, something that can’t be articulated in a government press release. The idea is to keep the nascent EV adoption as far away from Chinese technology and raw materials as possible so that India’s hydrocarbon dependence doesn’t metastasize into a different kind of geopolitical liability in the future. “Today 90% of global capacity is in China,” Ola Electric founder Bhavish Aggarwal said on Twitter after winning state support. “We will reverse that and make India a global hub for EVs and cell tech.”
That’s a lot of chutzpah for a startup valued at $5 billion, based on its last $200 million funding round in January. Ola Electric, backed by SoftBank Group Corp and Tiger Global Management, is tiny compared with Reliance, which is 45-times bigger in public markets. The conglomerate is controlled by Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man, who also owns the world’s largest oil-refining complex. Last year, he pirouetted to clean energy by announcing plans for everything from solar panels and batteries to green hydrogen and fuel cells. He committed $10 billion, but has already raised the investment target to $76 billion. There’s unlikely to be a bigger national champion of India’s bold pledge at the COP26 climate summit.
Yet, New Delhi is backing the lesser-known newbie. Aggarwal won incentives for the maximum 20 GWh that any one company was eligible to receive. Reliance also applied for the full quota,
but was put on the waitlist for 15 GWh.
Unlike Reliance, which recently bought a UK company with patents in sodium-ion cells — cheaper than lithium-ion, and therefore, potentially more attractive to buyers in emerging markets — Ola is yet to drop a hint about its technology. It wants to research and develop its own batteries, and fill the gaps with investments like the one it made recently in Israel’s StoreDot, whose silicon-dominant anodes claim to provide rapid charging.

—Bloomberg