BESS and Battery Cells

Imagine every smartphone, electric vehicle and now data centre backup battery in the country ultimately tracing back to the same small set of factories somewhere in the world that actually manufacture the individual battery cell, the small cylindrical or prismatic unit that stores charge chemically, because wiring thousands of finished cells together into a battery pack is a completely different, far less capital-intensive step than actually making the cell itself.

A Battery Energy Storage System, BESS, covered elsewhere on this site, is built from exactly this, thousands of individual battery cells wired together into modules and then racks, and the cell, not the finished pack or the BESS installation, is where the real capital intensity, chemistry expertise and manufacturing scale economics genuinely live, which is why a country's ability to assemble battery packs domestically says very little about whether it can actually make the cells inside them.

India illustrates this gap starkly, the country has built roughly 60 GWh of installed capacity to assemble battery packs, but actual battery cell manufacturing reached only about 1 GWh by the end of 2025, covering under 1% of India's roughly 260 GWh demand pipeline from competitive tenders, meaning nearly all the cells inside Indian-assembled batteries and BESS units, including those destined for data centre backup power, are still imported, overwhelmingly from China, and domestically manufactured cells still carry a 25-40% cost premium over imports because of smaller scale and an underdeveloped local supplier base for cathode materials, anodes, separators and electrolytes.

That gap is exactly what India's newest gigafactories are aimed at closing, Ola Electric's plant in Krishnagiri, Tamil Nadu began pilot-scale production of its own 4680-format cells in 2026 with a stated ambition of 100 GWh by 2030, and Amara Raja's Giga Corridor and Reliance New Energy's Jamnagar project are each pursuing similar scale, meaning a data centre operator's BESS order for backup or peak-shaving power is, underneath the finished product, really a bet on whether and how quickly domestic cell manufacturing can catch up to domestic pack assembly.