Amara Raja starts work on lithium-ion cells

Mumbai, Feb. 21: Amara Raja Batteries has opened the country's maiden technology hub to develop lithium-ion cells at its Tirupati facility in Andhra Pradesh.

The advanced lithiumion technology research hub, the pilot project located at its headquarters in Tirupati, will become the country's first lithium-ion cell manufacturing facility in the private sector over the next few years, Amara Raja Batteries CEO S. Vijayanand said.

The company has a technology transfer agreement with the Indian Space Research Organisation since early 2019.

Vijayanand said Amara Raja has already invested Rs 20 crore into the hub, excluding technology transfer and bidding fees paid to the Isro in January 2019.

The agreement with Isro for the technology transfer is without any royalty payment, he said.

Despite pushing lithium-ion cell development, Vijayanand feels leadacid batteries will continue to grow at least for a few more decades and that lithium cells used in electric vehicles will take time to get commercial traction. Currently, the electric vehicle (EV) makers import the cells mostly from China.

Electric mobility will be led by three-wheelers and two-wheelers to begin with, primarily because of the higher cost of ownership for an EV fourwheelers, he said.

Vijayanand expects that by 2025, two-and threewheelers penetration will touch 20-25 per cent in the country. The numbers are skewed towards more three-wheelers as they are commercially more viable.

The second phase will see the EV industry and the attendant ecosystem maturing with passenger vehicles and commercial vehicles going electric, and this should happen during 2025-30. "As I see it, private four-wheeler adoption should begin by 2025-27," he said.

In January 2019, Isro named 10 companies from a list of 141, to which it proposed to transfer the technology to manufacture lithiumion cells developed by the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thumba.

The 10 companies that got the tech licence are Amara Raja, Bharat Electronics Pune, Carborundum Universal Kochi, Exicom TeleSystems Gurgaon, GOCL Corporation Hyderabad, Jyoti CNC Automation Rajkot, Nalcom Bhubaneswar, Sukhbir Agro Energy Delhi, Tata Chemicals, and Thermax.