Delectrik Systems, an Indian vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) startup, has been awarded a 20MW/120MWh long-duration storage project in Gujarat, according to a report published on 28 October 2026.
The award is structured as a six-hour system — 20MW of power capacity paired with 120MWh of energy — and is described as one of the larger VRFB awards in the Indian market to date.
Why duration is the headline number
Indian grid tenders have increasingly specified multi-hour storage rather than the one-to-two-hour blocks that dominated early battery procurement. Six hours is squarely in long-duration territory, and it is precisely the operating window where flow batteries are designed to compete.
"VRFBs are designed for stationary energy storage, can provide extended discharge periods, allow electrolyte reuse through repeated charging cycles, and permit storage capacity to be increased independently of power output."
That last property is central to the Gujarat configuration. In a flow system, power is set by stack area and count, while energy is set by the volume of vanadium electrolyte held in tanks. A developer can therefore add hours by adding electrolyte rather than by adding cells, and can expand capacity later without replacing the power block.
Electrolyte supply is the constraint to watch
A 120MWh system translates into a substantial electrolyte order. VRFB electrolyte is produced from vanadium pentoxide flake — typically 98% minimum grade with low sodium and potassium content — the same traded intermediate used for ferrovanadium and chemical catalysts.
Electrolyte manufacturing remains heavily concentrated in China. James Costello, chief executive of Australian VRFB developer EORA Energy, said vanadium electrolyte is still mostly produced in China, attributing that to state subsidies and market scale, and noting that there is plenty of electrolyte available — cost, rather than availability, is the binding issue.
For an Indian developer, that concentration creates both a logistics question and a policy one, given New Delhi's push for domestic manufacturing content in clean-energy supply chains.
A market still defining itself
India has run a series of large storage tenders, but vanadium flow awards have been far rarer than lithium-ion wins. A 120MWh contract is therefore a reference point rather than a trend line — it gives the domestic supply chain a bankable project to point to, and gives lenders a cost benchmark for six-hour vanadium storage.
The key details still to be confirmed publicly are the offtaker, the delivery schedule and the electrolyte sourcing route. Those three variables will determine whether the Gujarat award becomes a template for further Indian VRFB procurement or remains an outlier.
This article was assisted by AI analysis. Please refer to the original source for official information.