As governments seek to reduce dependence on China’s lithium supply chain and artificial intelligence fuels a surge in electricity demand, a new battleground is emerging: long-duration energy storage.
That is the opportunity Offgrid Energy Labs is chasing. The company traces its origins to IIT Kanpur, where its founders met and began developing the battery technology before taking it to global markets. Today, its first manufacturing facility is in the UK, while its technology—developed through years of R&D in India—is being positioned for applications ranging from AI data centres to renewable energy storage, where the company believes alternative chemistries can complement lithium rather than replace it.
“Many years back when we started this, the four of us had this dream of building a battery which is not only sustainable but also commercially viable—and can be built anywhere in the world,” Rishi Srivastava Co-founder, Offgrid Energy Labs, said.
Offgrid’s ZincGel platform is built on zinc-bromine chemistry, which the founders say offered the best balance of safety, longevity and commercial viability for stationary energy storage after evaluating multiple battery chemistries.
“Everybody knew that this battery chemistry works, but how do we make it commercially viable? The entire innovation has been on materials chemistry, design of the battery and manufacturing… bringing down the cost and improving the performance,” Tejas Kusurkar, Co-founder & CEO, Offgrid Energy Labs, said.
The company says zinc-bromine batteries are non-flammable, can operate across a six-to-sixteen-hour discharge range and are designed for more than 20 years of operation.Also Read| India-origin battery tech powers Offgrid’s first UK manufacturing facility
The company’s thesis comes as countries including India, the US and members of the European Union invest heavily in building domestic battery manufacturing ecosystems and reducing reliance on imported critical minerals and battery technologies. India’s ₹18,100-crore Advanced Chemistry Cell (ACC) production-linked incentive scheme is among those efforts, although much of the country’s current strategy remains centred on lithium-ion technology.
Betting where China is less dominant
“One of our key design goals was to make stationary energy storage both sustainable and commercially viable,” Srivastava said.
China has spent years building a commanding position across the lithium-ion battery value chain—from refining critical minerals and processing battery materials to manufacturing cells at scale. According to the International Energy Agency, the country accounts for the majority of global battery cell production capacity and dominates several stages of battery materials processing, prompting governments elsewhere to diversify supply chains.
Offgrid isn’t trying to take on lithium across every application.
Instead, it is targeting long-duration stationary energy storage, where batteries store electricity generated from renewable sources for six-to-sixteen hours before discharging it when demand peaks. Unlike electric vehicle batteries, where energy density is paramount, long-duration storage places greater emphasis on lifecycle, safety and cost over repeated daily charge-discharge cycles.
“Energy storage would become a geopolitical issue… More and more countries are becoming very wary of putting all their eggs in the lithium basket,” Srivastava added, arguing that battery supply chains are increasingly becoming an energy security issue rather than just a manufacturing challenge.
The company says its batteries use materials such as zinc, bromine, carbon and polymers that are widely available across geographies, allowing manufacturing to be localised instead of relying on concentrated supply chains. That proposition, it argues, offers governments and utilities an additional option as they seek greater resilience in battery supply chains.
Lithium-ion batteries, however, remain the dominant technology globally, backed by decades of manufacturing scale, falling costs and a mature supply chain. Alternative chemistries such as zinc-bromine, sodium-ion and vanadium flow batteries are still at much earlier stages of commercial deployment and will need to prove they can compete on cost, reliability and scalability.
Choosing zinc over the periodic table
According to the founders, the team spent years evaluating multiple battery chemistries—including lithium, aluminium, manganese and carbon-based supercapacitors—before narrowing its focus to zinc-bromine. The decision was driven less by inventing a new chemistry and more by identifying one that could be made commercially viable for long-duration storage.
ET OnlineOffgrid Energy Labs co-founders (L-R) Brindan Tulachan, Ankur Agarwal, Tejas Kusurkar and Rishi Srivastava with Baroness Luciana Berger, Chair of the Energy Storage Association (UK).
Rather than competing with lithium in electric vehicles, the company says it focused on redesigning zinc-bromine’s materials, electrolyte and manufacturing process to improve performance and lower costs for stationary energy storage.
AI could create the next battery boom
If electric vehicles drove the first wave of battery demand, Offgrid believes artificial intelligence could drive the next.
The company has identified AI data centres, renewable energy projects and industrial power users as its three primary markets.
“Today, if we had batteries available in abundance, data centres would snap them up because there is a huge gap between supply and demand,” Srivastava said.
The International Energy Agency expects electricity demand from data centres to rise sharply over the coming years as AI adoption accelerates. As utilities struggle to add capacity quickly enough, companies are increasingly looking at battery storage to complement renewable generation and reduce dependence on diesel backup systems.
Offgrid says it is already in discussions with customers across the UK, Europe and India, although commercial deployments will follow product certification over the coming months.
The company argues that the opportunity is not simply about replacing lithium in existing applications but serving entirely new ones created by the rapid expansion of renewable energy and AI infrastructure.
“We’re also addressing a market which didn’t exist before,” Srivastava said. “Data centres require a humongous amount of power… there really isn’t any technology that addresses the 6-to-16-hour sweet spot as well as we do commercially.”
Research in India, built for global markets
The company’s global ambitions began at IIT Kanpur, where its founders met and spent the early years using the institute’s laboratories before moving into commercial pilots with partners including Shell. The technology was subsequently validated through pilot projects with Shell, which later invested through Shell Ventures. Today, Offgrid says it has built more than 70 intellectual property assets spanning chemistry, materials, battery design and manufacturing.
The completed Offgrid battery.
“The initial impetus has all come from India,” Srivastava said.
Britain, Srivastava says, was chosen as Offgrid’s pilot factory because of the country’s specialised battery manufacturing expertise, certification ecosystem and proximity to European customers rather than tax incentives.
“The UK is currently the beachhead for the manufacturing setup. But we will have much larger facilities in India as well as in other countries,” he added.
The company says it intends to establish manufacturing facilities in India as well while expanding internationally through partnerships.
Selling technology, not just batteries
Rather than following the traditional battery manufacturing model, Offgrid says it wants to own the chemistry and intellectual property while relying on partners to manufacture and deploy solutions across different markets.
“We’re not a monolithic battery company… ZingGel is a platform. It’s not a product,” Srivastava said.
“We are actually going to continue heads down, focused on adding to our IP portfolio… We will partner with the best-in-class people around the world to build solutions on ZingGel. ZingGel is a platform. It’s not a product,” Srivastava added.
In practice, that means Offgrid intends to focus on developing battery chemistry and intellectual property while licensing manufacturing and partnering with companies that can integrate the technology into applications such as data centres, renewable energy projects and industrial energy systems.
The company believes this asset-light approach will allow it to scale globally faster than if it attempted to build and operate every factory itself.
The race now is execution
After nearly eight years of research and raising $17.2 million to date, Offgrid’s next challenge is no longer scientific discovery.
The company expects the next phase to move much faster than the first, but acknowledges that battery technologies typically mature over decades rather than years.
“In the world of energy storage, time is seen in decades, not years,” Srivastava said. “Having started from a white piece of paper on a dream back in IIT Kanpur, I think we’ve actually been pretty fast.”
The first UK facility will manufacture batteries for certification and commercial pilot projects before the company begins work on gigawatt-scale factories in Britain and India. It also plans to raise fresh capital to fund the next phase of expansion.
“The biggest challenge is the velocity of execution. We’re at the right place at the right time. We just need to put our heads down and execute,” Srivastava added.
The next test will be commercial rather than scientific.
Whether Offgrid succeeds will depend less on proving zinc-bromine chemistry—the company believes that milestone has largely been achieved—and more on how quickly it can secure certifications, scale manufacturing and convert customer interest into commercial deployments. If successful, it would also demonstrate whether battery technology conceived at IIT Kanpur and developed through years of R&D in India can compete in a global battery industry searching for alternatives alongside today’s dominant lithium ecosystem.
(The writer was in Hampshire, England at the invitation of Offgrid Energy Labs)
