India's Former Power Secretary Backs Cross-Border Grid Trade Over Batteries

India's Former Power Secretary Backs Cross-Border Grid Trade Over Batteries Alok Kumar argues regional electricity trade beats domestic storage for absorbing India's renewables, as grid managers grapple with intermittency. Former power secretary Alok Kumar argued on 2026-06-03 that regional power trade is a cheaper and smarter answer to India's renewable-driven grid strain than battery storage alone, Outlook Business reported. He said India's power sector has reached a point where renewable energy now dominates new capacity additions, putting fresh pressure on the people who balance the grid.⁷ The shift carries real money. The choice between building domestic storage and importing flexibility across borders shapes billions in future investment, and Kumar's case is that trading power with neighbours such as Bangladesh smooths the peaks and troughs at lower cost than batteries sited inside India.⁷ The logic is straightforward. Renewables are intermittent, so a grid leaning heavily on them needs something to fill the gaps when the sun sets or the wind drops. Batteries do that job, but they are capital-intensive, and a regional market lets a country draw on a neighbour's surplus instead of paying to store its own.⁷ The argument echoes a wider regional debate. In Southeast Asia, Mott MacDonald has made a parallel case, arguing that ASEAN's surging power demand, driven partly by digital infrastructure, requires gigawatt-scale renewables backed by a connected regional grid and subsea interconnectors. Both pitches run into the same wall: regulatory gaps, financing hurdles and supply-chain bottlenecks that slow interconnector projects everywhere they are proposed.⁵ The timing is awkward. Asia's energy security has been tested hard this year, with the region's top LNG importers turning back to coal to keep the lights on as spot prices roughly doubled and imports fell sharply, energynewsbeat.com reported on 2026-05-19. That is the backdrop against which India is weighing how to firm up an increasingly renewable grid.⁶ India felt the squeeze directly. The Economist reported on 2026-05-19 that the Mangalore MRPL refinery, which accounts for 6% of India's crude-processing capacity, shut one of its three units, while refiners across the region cut output by 10% or more, according to Kpler.³ Coal remains the fallback. It still supplies roughly 35% of global electricity, and more than 2,000 GW of capacity remains operational worldwide even as renewables undercut it on cost in most markets, according to globalelectricity.org on 2026-05-20. For a country trying to lean away from imported fuel, cross-border electricity trade offers a route that does not depend on a tanker clearing a chokepoint.¹ There is a diplomatic dimension too. Europe and India have moved closer on trade, with the Economist reporting on 2026-05-19 a long-awaited free-trade deal under which tariffs on European cars are set to fall from 110% to 10% under a quota. EU exports to India run at about €76bn, just 0.4% of the bloc's GDP, while India's €105bn in goods and services exports to the EU roughly matches the $129bn it sent to America in 2024.² None of that builds an interconnector. The harder question for Kumar's thesis is whether neighbours can be relied upon for firm supply when demand peaks regionally rather than locally. A heatwave that strains India's grid may strain Bangladesh's at the same hour, leaving little surplus to trade. Batteries, for all their cost, sit inside the border and answer to one system operator.⁷ Wood Mackenzie has flagged the broader strain. Power demand growth is accelerating across emerging markets on electrification and an AI-driven data-centre boom, and whether supply can ramp fast enough is unsettled. Regional trade only helps if the surplus exists to move.⁴ The signal to watch is concrete capacity. India and Bangladesh already exchange some power, but scaling that into a market that genuinely substitutes for storage needs transmission build-out and clearing rules that do not yet exist at the volume Kumar envisages. Until interconnector capacity and a functioning regional clearing mechanism materialise, the cheaper-than-batteries claim stays a thesis rather than a settled trade.⁷