Zahurancik said the company—backed by US-based power major AES and Siemens—has started discussions with domestic partners to localize manufacturing of battery energy storage system (BESS) components and is evaluating India as a potential export hub for Asia Pacific and neighbouring markets.
The US Virginia-based Fluence is among the world’s largest battery storage providers, with about 25% market share. It has manufacturing facilities in the US and Vietnam.
Zahurancik said the company’s manufacturing plans for India are still in the prototype stage and timelines for commercial sales have not been finalized yet.
“We will continue and explore expansions of our manufacturing, particularly of the enclosure control systems and the others to make sure that we can ensure high quality on those pieces,” Zahurancik told Mint. “So, we have been exploring manufacturing in India. We have some manufacturing already in Vietnam, so we continue to look at opportunities to invest in those places as we see that the scale of this is getting bigger every year.”
Fluence caters to industrial groups and companies in the utilities and independent power producers (IPP) sectors. It had set up India’s first megawatt scale grid connected battery storage capacity with a 10 MW/10 MWh project in Delhi for Tata Power Delhi Distribution Ltd way back in 2019.
The company has a global innovation centre in the country in Bengaluru, which focuses on research and development, engineering, product development and services.
Asked about the company’s plans to export components from India, Zahurancik said: “We have a large presence in India through our global innovation centre and so we have made a big commitment to the people in India,” he said. “It’s one of our largest single offices and it’s where we continue to recruit a lot of the talent and our product development organization and then that’s naturally been translating into looking at how we go into using Indian vendors for production here in India as well as shipping throughout the region. We don’t have a specific date on it, but it’s an active part of what we are doing right now.”
He said the company’s process to diversify geographies started during the covid-19 pandemic due to supply chain issues and restrictions in several countries pertaining to Chinese products. He noted that while Europe and India are the company’s key markets, it has looked at expanding the manufacturing bases with the plans for Europe largely in the slow lane.
“In the covid period, we had most of the production coming out of Vietnam and China. Then we found during the covid and post-covid period that it became very difficult to ensure the timelines and quality for our customers when all over the world shipping was disrupted,” Zahurancik said. “There were times when it was costing us more to bring goods from abroad than it was to actually manufacture the goods in those countries. So, we started down a path of diversification of the supply chain and so we have added some production in the US. We were working on a plan to add production in Europe, and that got a little bit side-tracked with some of the changes that happened there with different battery vendors.”
Speaking of Europe, the executive said that “it really hasn’t been a very strong emergence of a local battery supply in Europe yet” but the company has started to relocate some of the other pieces of the system. “We do procure a lot of the inverters and the other pieces from Europe and then we are looking throughout the Asia Pacific region, saying where else should we be going beyond facilities that we already have in Vietnam. So, I think India is one of those countries that we continue to look at and see the possibility for strong growth.”
The president for Fluence’s US operations, noted that although the initial capacity addition of energy storage projects in India is yet to gain momentum, the company sees potential in the market. “We are watching a number of other geographies where it seems like there’s emerging possibility. So, India is one where we have been involved for a long time. The market has been in a kind of stop-start mode for a little bit and so we continue to look and see possibilities over there,” he said.
Fluence’s current installed battery energy capacity in India is 270 MWh, largely as part of hybrid green energy projects.
Although, India’ offers a production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme for battery storage, and several players, including Reliance Industries, Ola Electric and Rajesh Exports, have entered the battery manufacturing space, a significant progress in the manufacturing space is yet to take place—a major reason being supply chain constraints and lack of knowledge transfer and mobility from China.
India’s energy storage space is in a nascent stage. As of December 2024, India had installed 4 GWh (gigawatt hour) installed standalone battery storage capacities. However, the trend of integrating energy storage with solar and wind power projects is widely expected to boost the capacity, going ahead. The Central Electricity Authority (CEA) has projected that India will require around 82.37 GWh of energy storage capacity by FY27, and about 411.4 GWh by 2031-32.
The pipeline of storage capacities is growing. During April-October 2025, central nodal agencies and state distribution companies have awarded standalone BESS projects aggregating over 20 GWh. Also, the share of round-the-clock (RTC), firm and dispatchable renewable energy (FDRE) and solar plus storage projects remained high at 90% of the total renewable energy capacity awarded in the first eight months of the current fiscal year.
A recent report by Icra said the significant decline in battery costs over the past decade has helped reduce the cost of energy storage and adoption of BESS projects globally. Based on prevailing battery costs, the domestic ratings agency estimates that the levelized cost of storage using BESS for 2-4 hours is relatively high, in the range of ₹4.0-7.0 per unit, compared to ₹5 per unit for pumped storage hydropower (PSP) projects.
In 2022, the cost was in the range of ₹8-9 per unit. While BESS costs for 4-hour storage remain higher than that of the PSP, the execution risks and gestation period for the BESS projects are relatively lower, making battery storage more attractive for developers and investors, the report said.
