Ola Electric looks beyond scooters

Ola Electric is expanding its battery business from just electric vehicles to a larger energy storage business and has unveiled a three-tier Shakti portfolio that will span homes, commercial facilities and grid-scale applications.The company on Saturday introduced Shakti Gen2 for homes, Shakti Rack for businesses and Mahashakti for large-scale energy storage, with the portfolio ranging from kilowatt-hour-scale residential systems to a 6.26 MWh containerised storage system.The company said the new portfolio will be built around its indigenous Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) cell technology. This marks an expansion of the energy platform beyond the first-generation Ola Shakti, which was launched earlier this year using Ola’s 4680 Bharat Cells.Ola has pitched the portfolio as part of its push towards what it calls India’s “energy independence.” “India’s next independence will be energy independence,” the company said on its Shakti website.In May, founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal had said the company saw energy storage as one of three key demand engines for its cell manufacturing business, alongside electric vehicles and external cell sales.Its parent company in May had also approved a Rs 2,000 crore investment into its wholly-owned subsidiaries focused on electric vehicle and battery manufacturing. The board had cleared a Rs 1,500 crore infusion into Ola Electric Technologies (OET) and Rs 500 crore into Ola Cell Technologies (OCT) through compulsory convertible preference shares, according to a stock exchange filing.Many use cases The company on its website claimed that for residential use cases, Shakti Gen2 can be controlled through the Shakti app and can also be integrated with solar power through the company’s solar charge controller.The product photos show a compact, the design is closer to a consumer appliance than a conventional industrial battery cabinet, an attempt by Ola to make its energy storage a household product.The earlier Shakti range offered 5.2 kWh and 9.1 kWh systems, with the larger system delivering 6 kW of power and up to 1.5 hours of backup at full load. The new announcement expands the range further from 4.6 kWh to 6.26 MWh.The Mahashakti platform will allow Ola to offer commercial and utility-scale storage for manufacturing facilities, warehouses, commercial buildings, retail and data infrastructure. A Mahashakti rack has 257 kWh of energy capacity and more than 125 kW of expandable power capabilityIn its FY26 disclosures, the company said Shakti had generated more than 50,000 customer leads, with interest from telecom companies, petrol pumps, retail chains, dark stores and other commercial users. It also said Mahashakti was being developed for commercial and industrial as well as utility-scale storage.Ola Electric reported Rs 295 crore in revenue from operations in Q1 FY27, a 45% year-on-year decline, even as its net loss narrowed to Rs 336 crore from Rs 428 crore in the year-ago quarter.