By Ashwin Shankar
It is now clear that the future of mobility in India over the next decade is going to be defined by the electrification of personal, public and commercial transport. The sales of EVs over the last year seem to indicate this as there is over 5x growth in the annual sales of electric 2Ws so far in this financial year.
However, the EV penetration is still extremely low at 0.8%. One of the key reasons for this slow adoption is range anxiety and lack of charging infrastructure. While there are currently 610,000 electric vehicles on the road in India, there are only 2000 public charging stations.
Before this budget, most of the government policies such as “Faster adoption and manufacturing of Hybrid and Electric vehicles (FAME)” and “Production linked incentive scheme (PLI)” were created to incentivize OEM manufacturers to produce EVs. The government has rightly identified the support charging infrastructure as a bottleneck for increased adoption of electric vehicles in India. Within charging infrastructure, there was recognition for the first time for battery swapping with an announcement for a battery swapping policy in the works.
India is primarily a 2 and 3-wheeler country. Over 80% of the country’s vehicle sales are of 2Ws and 3Ws. The simplicity of vehicle design and the smaller battery packs needed to power the electric versions of 2/3Ws makes them a prime candidate for swapping.
The discharged battery packs (about the size of a shoebox) in these 2/3W EVs can be removed from the vehicle and “swapped” out manually for a fully charged battery pack at a battery swapping station. The discharged battery is then charged at the swapping for another user. The entire process takes less than 2 mins as opposed to having to wait up to 5 hours to recharge the battery via plug in chargers.
The battery swapping model for recharging 2/3W EVs helps entirely eliminate the requirement of setting up such individual plug-in charging points at parking spots. Setting up such charging points can be a hassle in crowded urban areas that often have very limited formal parking spots for 2/3W EVs. On the other hand, a single swapping station is able to cater to charging of multiple vehicles’ battery packs at a single location.
Today, battery swapping is already seeing wide adoption in the commercial 2/3 W EV use case (e.g. e-rickshaws and last mile delivery operators), where they eliminate the need for the drivers to find charging points and any vehicle downtime associated with recharging.
The announcement of a swapping policy also made a mention of interoperability standards. Such standards have the potential to take swapping mainstream and create new and innovative business models around vehicle ownership. Vehicles can be sold without battery packs bringing down upfront costs of EVs. These batteries can then be provided on a per swap basis by battery swapping service operators to EV owners.
In the absence of battery standards, every OEM would have their own battery packs and swapping operators would have to choose which OEM’s battery pack they would like to offer. The business model for a swapping service would not be viable as the battery packs would only be compatible with vehicles belonging to 1 OEM (imagine if Indian Oil’s or HPCL’s petrol was compatible with only one OEM’s vehicle). Interoperability will ensure usage across OEMs ensuring maximum utilization of the battery packs being provided in the swapping service.
It would, however, be interesting to see how the interoperability standards play out in the industry. A big concern in the industry might be around whether such a standardization can stifle innovation in battery packs and EVs. Battery packs being one of the bulkiest components of the EVs needs to be factored in when the vehicle is being designed. With specific standards, OEMs could lose flexibility over their vehicle’s design and engineering. They may also lose the ability to create a differentiated product around battery pack performance in order to comply with mandated standards.
Despite these concerns, a battery swapping policy will be a clear step towards making battery swapping mainstream and providing it as a viable alternative to setting up infrastructure of plug-in chargers for recharging of EVs in India.
(Ashwin Shankar is Founder of BatteryPool, a startup that builds swapping stations for electric 2/3 wheelers. Devang K, a student at OP Jindal University also contributed to this article.)
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