India’s push for electric vehicles is gaining traction with government as well as the private sector increasing investment in the back-end infrastructure required to achieve the Centre’sall electric vehicle target by 2030.
Activity under the Centre’s Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Hybrid and Electric Vehicles (FAME) scheme has picked up pace over the last year with the Centre providing direct support to more than 49,000 electric and hybrid vehicles between November 2016 and June 2017.
Previously, it had provided support for 99,000 vehicles between April 1, 2015 and November 2016.
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Last month, the government-owned Energy Efficiency Services signed an agreement for the purchase of 10,000 electric vehicles from Tata Power with 500 of the vehicles to be delivered by November. The project attracted bids from domestic companies Tata Motors and Mahindra & Mahindra and from the Japanese multinational, Nissan.
“Environmental concerns are growing and people are realising they have to be responsible as far as fuel consumption is concerned,” Alok Tripath, executive director at the Petroleum Conservation Research Association said in an interview.
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Charging infrastructure
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“In India, people are mistakenly thinking that providing charging infrastructure for electric vehicles is a the job of distribution companies, and the distribution companies feel this is just a plug point that needs to be given in which the car can be charged,” Sanjay Aggarwal, managing director, Fortum India, told The Hindu.
“But this is far from the truth in the sense that it is more of a service provider function,” Mr. Aggarwal added. “Electricity just happens to be a small part of the whole service offering. In Norway, we have a cloud service that is also connected to the payment gateway and every individual electric car owner gets an RFID tag. So while you are driving, you can look up on an app where the next charging station is and what the status of your battery is.”
Fortum Oyj, the Finnish clean energy parent company of Fortum India, signed a memorandum of understanding with NBCC (India) Limited, a Government of India enterprise, to bring this cloud-based back-end infrastructure for electric vehicles to India.
As a first step, Fortum inaugurated one 22 KW AC charger on a pilot basis in New Delhi. “We are looking to install 100-160 charging stations in the next 12 months in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore,” Mr. Aggarwal added.
The Centre also initiated its own pilot projects in the sector, having installed 25 charging stations in Bengaluru.
Competitive transport fuel bodies like the Indian Auto LPG Coalition have raised objections to electric vehicles saying that they were not suitable for commercial purposes since such vehicles do not remain idle at night, when most electric vehicle batteries are normally charged. This too can be addressed, Fortum said.
“India doesn’t have cars in India that can be connected to the DC chargers,” Mr. Aggarwal said. “Instead, they rely on AC charging which takes about 4-6 hours to charge. A DC charger typically takes 30 minutes for a full charge. Abroad, companies like Nissan and Tesla already have DC charging vehicles. As more car manufacturers come to India for electric, then DC charging will also be established.”