The Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) has said India must scale up its grid-scale battery capacity as the country moves from a problem of generation to one of timing and flexibility. The council set out its findings in a working paper titled The Duck and The Camel: Tracing the Net Load on the Indian Power Grid, which argued that the most direct remedy is to store energy when it is abundant and release it when it is scarce. It noted that storage is overwhelmingly a battery gap.

The paper observed that grid-scale battery deployment remains well short of the national target even as pumped hydro has very nearly reached its mark, and that recent build-out is significant but insufficient. It said a large-scale battery build-out can effectively flatten net loads rather than being a mere conjecture. The council cited the California example where a battery fleet large enough to discharge over 10 GW charges into the midday surplus and discharges into the evening.

The report described how that fleet converts an evening net-load swing of nearly 28 GW into about 10 GW after accounting for discharge, and stated that this capability will be necessary as India’s solar fleet expands. It emphasised that India’s demand for power is not only large but extremely volatile even within a single day. The paper highlighted that at three forty-five pm on May 21, 2026 India’s power grid set an all-time record when peak demand met reached 270.8 GW.

The council added that the regulatory foundation is being re-laid with draft legislation and rules that write energy storage into the Act and into the definition of power system, and that market reforms aim to deepen the power market. Measures referenced include contracts for difference, a nationally floored non-fossil obligation backed by a monetary penalty, demand response and deadlines for time-of-day tariffs. The study concluded that scaling grid batteries will be critical to ensuring flexibility and reliability.