Greenko Energy Holdings targets to invest around $1 billion in a new battery storage business that also comprises of a plan to produce lithium-ion batteries in India for power grid-scale applications and electric vehicles (EV).

The fresh capital for renewables 3.0 investment will be organized by the Hyderabad-based company to obtain and advance lithium-ion battery technology, and for its manufacturing and application playbook. This comes against the backdrop of the single-largest foreign clean energy investment announcement in India made by Japan’s ORIX Corp. for $980 million in Greenko for a 17 percent stake.

Sovereign funds GIC Holdings Pte. Ltd and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) supported Greenko’s pivot towards battery storage comes amid India readying its proposed ?18,000-crore production-linked incentive package for battery storage manufacturing. India also plans to issue tenders for setting up Tesla-style gigafactories for cell and battery manufacturing.

As China dictates the lithium-ion cell manufacturing, India desires to evade a repeat of events with solar equipment manufacturing where China leveraged its first-mover advantage to capture the market. The value chain comprises processing of raw materials and manufacturing of separators, cathodes, electrolytes, anodes, cells, and battery storage packs.

This take up importance given India’s ambitious clean energy targets and the intermittent nature of electricity from clean energy sources. In this kind of situation, large grid-scale battery storages can aid to maintain spinning reserves to backing up round-the-clock demand for electricity.

Greenko has made the transition into a clean technology and solutions platform from pure play energy supply through planned investments in global battery and deep tech companies with intellectual property and indigenization of technology and manufacturing of Li-on batteries for grid and mobility needs of India.

Greenko is supposedly in discussions with Japan’s NEC Corporation to obtain Massachusetts-headquartered NEC Energy Solutions, which holds the intellectual property rights for megawatt-scale lithium-ion batteries.