Storage battery major Exide Industries on Tuesday said its board of directors has accorded in-principle approval to set up a greenfield multi-gigawatt lithium-ion cell manufacturing plant in India as it has planned to participate in the government’s production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme for advanced chemistry cell manufacturing.” Electric vehicle penetration in India is expected to become a reality in the near future.
The government is pushing electric vehicle manufacturing through a supportive policy framework and by providing incentives to the manufacturers in this space. As a result, lithium-ion battery-based storage solutions will gain prominence, for both Automotive and Industrial applications,” Exide Industries MD & CEO Subir Chakraborty said, commenting on the new development.
In a stock exchange filing, Exide Industries said its board, at a meeting held on Tuesday, consented to participate in the PLI scheme for ”National Programme on Advanced Chemistry Cell (ACC) battery Storage”, issued by the Ministry of Heavy Industries (MRI) for setting-up of multi-gigawatt Li-ion cell manufacturing facilities.
Chakraborty, in August this year, had said the company was exploring “all the possible options” to get into cell manufacturing for lithium-ion batteries and awaiting fine print and details of the PLI scheme for manufacturing advanced chemistry cell (ACC) batteries in the country.
The minimum investment needed for a cell manufacturing facility for lithium-ion batteries would be around $100 million per gigawatt-hour (GWh), he had informed.