Lithium-ion market in India set to climb by 35% CAGR to 2020
The market for lithium-ion batteries market in India is projected to witness double digit growth at over 35% CAGR during the next five years, according to a new research report by TechSci Research.
In India, lithium-ion batteries have enjoyed increasing adoption in consumer electronics such as smartphones, tablets, and healthcare equipment. With continuing technological developments, they are also being used in automobile industry, particularly in electric vehicles.
This is now acting as a catalyst for market growth in the country. However, India largely imports lithium-ion batteries from other Asian countries including China, Taiwan and South Korea.
This lack of indigenous manufacturing units for lithium-ion batteries is expected to act as a major growth inhibitor in the India market over the next five years.
However, government efforts to minimize carbon emissions and toxicity level in the environment is likely to drive the adoption of lithium-ion batteries across major end-use industries including consumer electronics and automotive. In addition, the government has announced tax exemption on electric vehicles powered by lithium-ion batteries, which is anticipated to drive the market over the next five years.
The major players in the Indian market are Samsung SDI, Sony and AMCO.
As an electrical egnenier, I love electric cars but I don’t think it’s the right answer. It may become part of the answer in the long run but I am against the mass promotion of electric or fuel cell vehicles.Think of it this way, the concept of using electric vehicles is to generate energy centrally from clean sources and to store the energy chemically for use in vehicles for transportation. The concept of using a hydrogen fuel cell car is to generate energy centrally from clean sources and to store the energy chemically for use in vehicles for transportation. The current concept of gasoline cars is to refine chemically stored energy collected by nature over millions of years and to use this chemically stored energy in vehicles for transportation. The only difference is that we are just finding the fossil fuels instead of making them.It’s a bit counter-intuitive for most people but hydrocarbon fuels such as gasoline and diesel are no different than hydrogen and batteries except that gasoline and diesel have much higher volumetric energy densities and we already have the infrastructure and vehicles to use them. Also, just as we can make hydrogen from H2O, we can make gasoline from CO2 and H2O. Sandia National Labs has done this, they were researching more efficient ways to produce hydrogen from H2O and concluded that it made more sense to continue the process and synthesize liquid hydrocarbon fuels for use in existing infrastructure and vehicles.There’s already 1 billion gas and diesel powered vehicles out there. If we wanted to benefit the environment, we would be simply changing how we make gasoline and diesel such that they become sustainable and perhaps even carbon negative. Promoting electric and fuel cell vehicles are just a matter of increasing consumerism so that manufacturers can sustain a growth rate that’s higher than what’s justified by population growth and end of life replacement alone. Indeed an artificially inflated economic growth rate has been sustained via designed obsolescence such as model years, and tail fins. There’s probably more of an economic boost from electric and hydrogen vehicles but this is at the cost of increased consumerism and hence increased environmental impact.Hopefully there will be more electric vehicles in the future but there’s no need to switch en masse to them. We already have a very good battery called gasoline and diesel, we just need to produce them from clean energy sources instead of drilling for them.