Ola Electric planning Indian battery plant
Softbank Group-backed Indian electric vehicle manufacturer Ola Electric is planning to build a battery cell factory in India with a capacity of up to 50 GWh, according to insiders.
Reuters news agency, citing inside information, reports that Ola alone will need 40 GWh of battery capacity to meet its goal of producing 10 million electric scooters a year. The rest will be used for electric cars, which Ola Electric plans to produce in the future. Plans for a compact city vehicle had been hinted at by Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal on Twitter in late January.
The plan is to initially build a capacity of one gigawatt-hour by 2023 and expand that to 20 GWh within three to four years, Reuters writes, citing another source. It is not clear from the report by when the expansion stage with 50 GWh is to be reached.
A possible location of the cell production has not yet been revealed. The magnitude of the investment is said to be up to one billion dollars or 895 million euros. Here, Ola can hope for subsidies from the Indian government. Ola is among the ten companies that applied for an Indian government program to promote domestic production of battery cells, with plans for factories with a total capacity of 130 GWh.
According to Reuters information, Ola Electric has so far been importing the cells for its electrically powered two-wheelers from South Korea.
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