The Indian State of Maharashtra today announced a strategic energy partnership with Gogoro Inc. (Nasdaq: GGR) and Belrise Industries (erstwhile known as Badve Engineering Ltd) to establish an unprecedented battery-swapping infrastructure. Gogoro, a global technology leader in battery swapping ecosystems that enable smart sustainable mobility solutions for cities, and Belrise, a leading automotive systems manufacturer based in India, plan a joint 50-50 partnership to invest approximately US$2.5 billion over eight years with the State of Maharashtra government to build energy infrastructure across the state. The non-binding MOU agreement was signed at the Maharashtra pavilion, World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
The companies plan to build a smart energy infrastructure in Maharashtra that is open and accessible and establishes battery swapping and smart battery stations as a leading source for mobility and energy storage. The deployment is also expected to accelerate job growth throughout the smart energy, electric vehicle, and sustainability value chain. In addition to the smart infrastructure, the partnership is also expected to foster smart electric vehicle manufacturing and assembly in the state.
The battery swapping infrastructure expects to begin deploying across the State of Maharashtra in 2023 which will leverage Gogoro’s smart energy ecosystem including smart battery stations, swapping technologies, network management solutions, and will provide numerous innovations to the state, contributing in the areas of smart city design and development, energy storage stations & systems, smart mobility sharing, smart electric vehicles, demand response services and distributed energy storage, smart agriculture, among other applications.
With more than 120 million residents, Maharashtra is India’s largest economy and industrialized State with a gross domestic product of more than US$450 billion that accounts for 16-percent of India’s industrial output.
