Gujarat Industrial Power Company Limited (GIPCL) has moved from tender to award on one of India's largest long-duration storage procurements, handing a 20MW/120MWh all-vanadium flow battery package to domestic VRFB manufacturer Delectrik Systems.

A six-hour asset, not a short-duration one

The system is sized for six hours of discharge at full power — the duration band where flow batteries are most often pitched against lithium-ion. For Delectrik, the win is its second hundred-megawatt-hour-class flow battery project this year, a signal that India's emerging LDES pipeline is beginning to concentrate around a small number of domestic suppliers.

The EPC contract and the price signal

On the construction side, listed infrastructure EPC firm Bondada Engineering Limited (BSE: 543971) has received a formal Letter of Intent from GIPCL for engineering, procurement and construction plus operations and maintenance of the storage system. The contract totals INR 239.25 crore, approximately RMB168 million.

Spread across 120MWh of capacity, the EPC-plus-O&M award equates to roughly RMB1.40 per Wh for a six-hour vanadium flow system.

Public price points for VRFB EPC contracts remain scarce, which makes this figure notable. It gives developers, lenders and state utilities a rare benchmark for what a turnkey six-hour vanadium project costs in an Indian context, including an O&M obligation bundled into the headline number.

What to watch next

Two questions will determine whether this award becomes a template. First, whether the supply and EPC scopes are executed on a schedule that supports GIPCL's grid-stability objectives; flow battery projects elsewhere have slipped on electrolyte delivery and stack manufacturing ramp-up. Second, whether the disclosed per-Wh figure survives detailed engineering, since headline EPC values in emerging storage markets often move once site conditions, grid interconnection and local content rules are fixed.

India's public tendering approach — bundling duration, supply and long-term O&M into a single utility-led procurement — is itself part of the story. It puts duration explicitly on the specification sheet, rather than treating storage as a generic megawatt requirement, and it is drawing vanadium chemistry into a market that was, until recently, almost entirely lithium-focused.

This article was assisted by AI analysis. Please refer to the original source for official information.