Companies under Piyush Goyal’s ministries to switch to e-cars
Officials and state firms under the power, coal, renewable energy and mines ministries will start using electric vehicles, catalysing the governments plan to make zeroemission cars popular, Piyush Goyal, minister in charge of these sectors, told ET. The government has already prepared guidelines for fastcharging stations for evehicles, while for buses, the plan is to have a system of swapping a used battery with a charged one, he said. Work has already begun to prepare tenders to buy the vehicles. Staterun Energy Efficiency Services Ltd (EESL) will soon invite bids for bulk supply of electric cars and other vehicles for its ministries and public sector undertakings located in Delhi. “Tenders for about 1,200 vehicles for offices of various departments in Delhi will give the first push to the electric vehicles market,” Goyal said. He said the market for evehicles in India is worth at least Rs 10,000 crore.
Public sector enterprises NTPC BSE 0.63 % , Power Grid BSE 0.24 % Corp and Coal India BSE 0.52 % will put fast electric vehicle charging stations in the parking areas and other available space. This will raise the volumes and lower prices just like the LED lamps, Goyal said. The government is coming out with guidelines for tenders seeking procurement of electrical city buses without batteries. The entire evehicles programme would be without any subsidy and push further the Make in India programme. The programme will make evehicles affordable than the conventional vehicles and people will automatically shift to electrical vehicles,” he said. The guidelines for setting up fast charging stations are also ready but the regulator needs to decide tariff for such electricity, Goyal said. “Since buses with battery cost more, we will introduce a battery swapping system,” he said.
ET reported on April 25 that the government will offer limited tax breaks for evehicle manufacturing and plans to introduce batteryless vehicles as a major push to evehicles programme. The programme has been planned by IITM professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala. EESL managing director Saurabh Kumar said the standards for electric vehicles are ready and the company will start tendering in a phased manner. “We will aggregate demand for the vehicles and roll out large bids. Later on, the state transportation commissions can look at procuring electric buses in large numbers,” Kumar told ET over phone from Delhi, adding Mahindra & Mahindra is already into ecars and two other players are willing to enter the market with capacity to scale up. Addressing the IndiaAustria Business Summit organised by Ficci here on Wednesday, Goyal said EESL’s UJALA scheme has scaled up LED lamps distribution to six lakhs a day. He said the programme will be replicated by EESL in London and urged Austria to shift to LED lamps.
(The correspondent’s tour to Vienna was sponsored by FICCI) ET View: Solar Charging Charging electric vehicles using power fuelled by fossil fuels would be retrograde. Instead, government needs to start installing rapid EV chargers fuelled by solar power at parking lots and fuel pumps. The plan needs to be extended to diffusing ultrafast chargers along highways. Fast charging requires more power and wears out car batteries sooner. However, battery technology is slated to improve at a fast clip, so shorter battery life would make public policy sense, and boost clean energy
Source:ET
