ZincGel vs Li-ion battery

by Hansraj Agrawal | Jul 12, 2026 | Science

STEADYING ROLE. Battery energy storage systems are vital to power supply infrastructure today

Recently, Offgrid Energy Labs, a start-up incubated at IIT-Kanpur, announced it was setting up a 10 MWh pilot manufacturing facility in the UK to produce battery cells based on its proprietary ZincGel technology.

The company intends the UK plant to be a proving ground; the experience gained there, it says, will be used to establish large-scale manufacturing in India, where battery demand is expected to rise sharply as renewable energy capacity expands.

Unlike lithium-ion batteries, which rely on imported lithium, ZincGel uses zinc and bromine, both of which are abundantly available in India.

The ZincGel cell is unique in many other ways too. The basic zinc-bromine chemistry is nothing new, but it has not come into common use because of some key problems, mainly dendrite formation and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER).

Dendrites are the tiny metallic needles that emerge during repeated charging and they can pierce the separator and short-circuit the cell; hydrogen affects the cell’s efficiency by wasting a part of the charging energy and increasing internal pressure.

Offgrid Energy Labs says the key lies in its proprietary electrolyte, which makes its anode-less architecture possible. The anode-less architecture, where the anode is formed inside the cell during charging and disappears during discharging, is something that researchers have been toying with for a while. It is a mouthwatering idea because it saves the anode material completely.

Proprietary tech

Offgrid Energy Labs says it has cracked the technology. Instead of using a zinc metal anode from the outset, the battery starts with a bare current collector. During charging, zinc from the electrolyte is deposited onto this collector and dissolves back into the electrolyte during discharge. This reduces material use and simplifies cell construction.

The startup’s proprietary gel-based aqueous electrolyte, containing zinc bromide, additional zinc salts and specialised additives, prevents dendrite formation. The additives act as levelling agents and grain refiners, ensuring that zinc deposits as a dense, uniform layer instead of growing into needle-like dendrites.

The electrolyte is also designed to suppress hydrogen evolution. According to the company, proprietary additives bind free water molecules and reduce the unwanted side reactions that produce hydrogen gas.

At the positive electrode, activated carbon derived from coconut shells is used to trap bromine within its microscopic pores, thereby reducing bromine migration and improving both safety and cycle life.

Electrolyte’s role

Offgrid Energy Lab’s technology flags a significant trend in the evolution of electrochemical cell design. The electrolyte has typically been a passive medium through which ions pass from one electrode to the other. But the emerging approach — as evident in Offgrid Energy’s cell — is to expand the role of the electrolyte.

In ZincGel, the proprietary electrolyte is an active participant that performs many functions, such as suppressing dendrites and hydrogen evolution, and stabilising bromine.

The start-up, which raised $15 million from Archean Chemical Industries last year, has combined known techniques (gel electrolytes, additives, bromine-trapping carbon materials and anode-free architecture) to make a unique battery.

It says its system can deliver more than 5,000 charge-discharge cycles with round-trip efficiencies of 80-90 per cent.

Offgrid Energy is careful not to position ZincGel as a replacement for lithium-ion batteries, but as complementary in applications that require long-duration energy storage rather than high energy density.

While lithium-ion remains the preferred choice for electric vehicles and portable electronics, Offgrid Energy says zinc-bromine batteries offer advantages for grid balancing, renewable energy integration and industrial backup, where batteries are expected to discharge over 6-12 hours, operate safely over long periods and deliver thousands of charge-discharge cycles.

Published on July 13, 2026

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Why the energy sector isn’t AI-ready yet

by Hansraj Agrawal | Jul 12, 2026 | Science

NO BLACKOUTS. A grid drawing heavily on renewable energy can use AI to rapidly fill demand-supply gaps
| Photo Credit:
Ravi Muchhapothula

There is a photograph that energy companies love to show at conferences. A gleaming control room, banks of screens, operators watching dashboards fed by thousands of sensors across pipelines, wells and grids. Everything visible, everything connected, everything intelligent.

The KPMG Global Tech Report 2026, which surveyed 258 technology leaders across the oil and gas, mining, chemicals, power and utilities, and renewables sectors in 22 countries, tells a more complicated story. The screens are real. The dashboards exist. But the data feeding them is often incomplete, poorly governed or trapped in legacy systems.

One in five energy companies is achieving a return of more than 200 per cent on its technology investments. The majority, 57 per cent, are at break-even. The cross-sector average for technology ROI sits at 200 per cent. Energy lags, and has been lagging for a decade of heavy investment.

The pilot trap

Almost every large energy company has run AI pilots. Many have run dozens. Predictive maintenance. Production optimisation. Automated document processing. These pilots often work. They demonstrate value. And then they stop.

Twenty-nine per cent of energy companies are still in the piloting phase, running AI projects without clear returns. Executives expect that to fall to 2 per cent within a year, a claim so confident it functions as a test of whether the sector’s commitment to scale is real or rhetorical.

The obstacle is rarely AI. Around 60 per cent of energy executives say legacy systems are blocking full returns on their technology investments. An oil refinery built in the 1980s runs on control systems designed back then, robust and long-lived and wholly unequipped to share data with cloud platforms or machine learning models. Connecting them is slow, expensive and operationally risky. Upgrades are deferred, and the gap between the modern systems built on top and the ageing ones underneath — what one KPMG partner calls “digital debt” — keeps widening.

India makes this visible at scale. The National Thermal Power Corporation and the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation run sophisticated digital programmes. The State distribution companies that actually deliver electricity to homes are still fighting bad meter data, billing failures and grid losses, which in the worst-performing States exceed a quarter of the power generated. For them, the conversation about agentic AI is not yet relevant. It is about whether the underlying data is reliable enough to build on.

What the numbers hide

The financial returns that do exist come largely from the back office, finance, procurement, HR and compliance, where generative AI accelerates document-heavy work. Over 50 per cent of energy organisations report that AI contributes 31–40 per cent of their total financial benefits. That is substantial, and a long way from the story of AI changing how energy is produced and delivered, which remains, for most organisations, ahead of them.

At the operational front-end, AI’s most categorical value is in grid management. A coal or gas grid is predictable: Burn more fuel, get more power. A grid drawing heavily on solar and wind must balance variable supply against variable demand across thousands of connection points in real time, at a speed beyond human operators. India’s target of 500 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030, formalised in its Nationally Determined Contribution to the UNFCCC, will make this problem acute. The technical case for AI-driven grid management in India is as strong as elsewhere in the world. The implementation challenge, given the grid infrastructure and data quality across much of the country, is correspondingly harder.

Cutting corners

Nearly three-quarters of energy executives say that prioritising speed and cost-efficiency leads to trade-offs in security, scalability and data standardisation.

The consequences in energy are physical. A cybersecurity gap in a pipeline invites infrastructure disruption. A poorly governed AI model in grid management can contribute to blackouts. Improved cybersecurity management is the single most anticipated benefit from technology investment, ranked above revenue growth and operational efficiency.

AI sharpens the threat on both sides. It enables faster, more accurate threat detection. It also puts sophisticated attack tools within the reach of bad actors. Intrusions into Indian grid infrastructure have been documented by cybersecurity researchers, though attribution in specific cases remains contested. As India’s grid becomes more connected and AI-dependent, the attack surface expands. The gap between national cybersecurity policy and the operational reality at smaller State utilities is consequential in the country’s energy transition.

The missing skill

Ninety-six per cent of energy leaders believe that managing AI agents will be a key workforce skill within five years. The current generation of AI tools recommend; the next will act. An agentic system will not suggest adjusting a valve — it will adjust it. Managing that shift requires people who understand what these systems are doing, when to override them, and where human judgment remains indispensable.

India has engineering depth and a growing data science community. What it lacks, at scale, is the overlap: People who understand both the physics of energy systems and the architecture of AI. Shreyansh Upadhyay, KPMG India’s AI for Energy chair, puts it plainly. The biggest challenge is in building models that are context-aware and grounded in the physical behaviour of actual machinery, not just historical data patterns. That combination is hard to hire and harder to build quickly.

Published on July 13, 2026

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IT services giant TCS takes an AI-led avatar

by Hansraj Agrawal | Jul 12, 2026 | Science

GLOBAL DELIVERY HUB. TCS Seven Hills Park in Milford, near Cincinnati, Ohio

As information technology (IT) services firms navigate a stormy AI terrain, industry bellwether Tata Consultancy Services is focused on transforming not just its clients’ businesses but also its own.

This internal overhaul is powered both by its massive Indian centres and a team in the quaint, wooded town of Milford, near Cincinnati, Ohio State, in the US.

As TCS positions itself as an AI-first global technology services company, its Cincinnati global delivery centre serves as a hub for regulated US work, AI innovation, talent development and collaboration with universities.

Moreover, the centre — TCS Seven Hills Park — is not just the IT major’s largest in North America but also its largest self-owned facility globally. The campus is nestled in 220-plus acres of wooded land — a far cry from the concrete urban jungle of most tech parks elsewhere.

“Last year, we had revenue close to $30 billion, of which about 49 per cent comes from North America. That’s our largest market globally,” Rajeev Gupta, Head, Delivery and Capability Centres-US, tells businessline at the Milford facility.

“We aspire to be the world’s largest AI-led technology services company; the work towards that starts from internal transformation, and centres like these are critical to building a future-ready talent pipeline,” he adds. With seating for nearly 1,100 employees, the Cincinnati outpost is helping translate the futuristic expectations of clients into practical tech solutions at its ‘Bringing Life to Things’ lab.

Inaugurated in 2024, the lab works on rapid prototyping and next-generation engineering solutions focused on the internet of things (IoT), AI, generative AI (GenAI) and software-defined vehicles (SDVs).

It has clients and partners across sectors, who visit the lab regularly to ideate with the team, identify opportunities and find ways to build solutions to their problems.

The advanced projects bridge physical engineering with AI. Among the high-profile projects anchored here is a digital twin of a human heart — a virtual replica of the organ, built using real-time biometric tracking and GenAI. “Our objective is to get our customers out of POC (proof-of-concept) purgatory. So, some things here are commercialised, but some of the more new-age applications are still a few steps away from commercialisation,” says Brian Purvis, Project Manager, TCS.

The centre also designs solutions to train robots to work in the real-world environment — simulation systems help program a factory robot to pick up a part, apply the right pressure and other haptics. There is a section displaying 3D printing capabilities.

The campus now hosts the new specialised computer systems Nvidia Spark and Thor to work on cutting-edge AI models. You cannot also miss the drones flying around, enthusiastically operated by engineers in their downtime.

Set up in 2008, the facility’s location in Cincinnati helps TCS access a readily available talent pool in a 400-500 mile radius. “The retention rates here are also some of the best in the industry,” says Gupta. “We continue to expand in other US locations, but Cincinnati will continue to be one of our largest delivery centre locations,” he adds.

(The writer was in Ohio on a foreign press tour organised by the US State Department)

Published on July 13, 2026

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IIT-M revives forgotten route to industrial wastewater treatment

by Hansraj Agrawal | Jul 12, 2026 | Science

Prof. Rajnish Kumar, Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT-Madras

For decades, scientists have known that gas hydrates — ice-like crystals formed when water traps certain gases under low temperatures and moderate pressure — could, in principle, purify contaminated water.

The idea was always attractive: Water locks itself into crystals while salts and other impurities are left behind. But there was a catch.

Separating the crystals from the remaining wastewater proved cumbersome and energy-intensive, preventing the technology from competing with membrane-based systems, such as reverse osmosis (RO).

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, now say they have overcome that bottleneck.

The team has developed and patented a gas hydrate-based process that forms hydrate crystals directly in the gaseous phase, eliminating the need for filtration or centrifugation to separate them from wastewater.

In tests using actual petrochemical effluent supplied by GAIL (India) Ltd, the system recovered more than 65 per cent of the water, removed 84-93 per cent of contaminants, and recycled over 99 per cent of the hydrate-forming gases used in the process.

Developed by Dr Subhash Kumar Sharma under the supervision of Prof Rajnish Kumar, the process offers an alternative to RO. (RO’s membranes are prone to fouling, require periodic replacement and generate solid waste. Thermal processes avoid membranes but consume significantly more energy.)

A mixture of propane and HFC-134a is introduced into the contaminated wastewater under carefully controlled temperature and pressure. Water molecules assemble around the gas molecules, forming solid hydrate crystals while salts, ammonia, suspended solids and organic contaminants remain in the liquid.

The crystals are then gently melted to recover purified water, while the gases are captured and reused in the next cycle.

The technology consumed 3.88 kWh of electricity for every cubic metre of water recovered — comparable to seawater reverse osmosis and substantially below thermal desalination methods. The researchers estimate a levellised water cost of about 14 paise a litre and report a carbon footprint 35–70 per cent lower than that of conventional membrane- and heat-based technologies. The treated water met the Central Pollution Control Board standards for industrial reuse.

Kumar said the process could help industries reduce freshwater consumption while meeting increasingly stringent zero liquid discharge requirements.

The technology is at readiness level 6, indicating it has moved beyond laboratory proof-of-concept. The team plans pilot-scale demonstrations using wastewater from the pharmaceutical, textile and fertilizer industries.

Published on July 13, 2026

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IIT-Kanpur-incubated start-up develops unique battery technology

by Hansraj Agrawal | Jul 8, 2026 | Science

Offgrid Energy Labs spent six years in R&D before moving toward commercialisation, and has secured over 25 IP families and 50+ IP assets.

Last week, Offgrid Energy Labs, a start-up incubated at IIT Kanpur, announced that it was setting up a 10 MWh demonstration facility in the UK. It said a giga factory in India would follow later.

Most energy storage today runs on lithium-ion. The problem: lithium is expensive, geopolitically concentrated, and poses fire risks at scale. Offgrid Energy Labs, which raised $15 million from the Chennai-based bromide manufacturer Archean Chemical Industries, is building an alternative.

Their proprietary technology – ZincGel – is a zinc-bromine-based battery system designed specifically for stationary energy storage — solar farms, industrial facilities, data centres and off-grid communities, rather than electric vehicles.

The core chemistry uses a water-based electrolyte, which eliminates fire risk and makes the battery significantly safer to deploy at scale. It delivers 80–90 per cent of the energy efficiency of a conventional lithium battery, at a lower levelised cost of storage, and lasts roughly twice as long — rated for 5,000+ cycles. It can also handle long-duration discharges of 6–12 hours and operate in temperatures as low as -10°C.

The company spent six years in R&D before moving toward commercialisation, and has secured over 25 IP families and 50+ IP assets.

businessline exchanged a series of emails with Dr Tejas Kursurkar, Co-founder, Offgrid Energy.

Excerpts:

Why did you choose to set up your first demo manufacturing facility in the UK instead of India?

The UK facility is a demonstration manufacturing plant designed to validate and optimise our production processes before we scale to commercial manufacturing. It is not a reflection of our long-term manufacturing strategy, but rather the fastest way to de-risk the technology in an ecosystem that offers strong R&D capabilities, supply chain readiness and early market adoption for clean energy technologies.

India remains central to our long-term vision. As one of the world’s fastest-growing energy storage markets, with ambitious renewable energy and storage targets, it represents a natural destination for future large-scale deployment and manufacturing. The knowledge, manufacturing processes and operational learnings from the UK demo facility will directly support our ability to scale efficiently and competitively for markets like India, where resilient, locally anchored battery supply chains will become increasingly important.

How far will ZincGel batteries help India wean itself away from China and support Atmanirbhar Bharat?

ZincGel represents an opportunity to diversify India’s battery ecosystem by reducing dependence on supply chains that are heavily concentrated around a handful of critical minerals and geographies. Today, while lithium-ion remains a good technology for certain uses, much of its value chain, from critical mineral processing technology to manufacturing, is concentrated in China, creating supply chain and geopolitical risks for not just India but the entire world.

ZincGel is built on zinc and bromine – materials that are far more abundant and geographically diversified. Zinc is mined at significantly larger volumes globally than lithium, and India is itself a major producer. On the bromine side, we are already working with Archean Chemical Industries, a Chennai-based company and one of our lead Series A investors, meaning part of the raw material supply chain is already anchored in India.

As India works towards its target of 500 GW of non-fossil power capacity and rapidly scales battery storage to support the grid, developing multiple battery chemistries will be critical for energy security. ZincGel is not intended to replace lithium-ion across every application. It is designed specifically for stationary energy storage, supporting renewable integration, grid balancing, industrial backup and microgrids, where long cycle life, safety, cost stability and supply chain resilience are often more important than energy density.

By enabling battery manufacturing around abundant, locally accessible materials, ZincGel can contribute to a more resilient and self-reliant energy storage ecosystem, complementing lithium-ion while advancing India’s Atmanirbhar Bharat ambitions.

What is the proprietary electrolyte, broadly?

Broadly, the proprietary electrolyte is a ZincGel proprietary mix. Chemically, it utilises a concentrated aqueous (water-based) Zinc Bromide foundation.

It incorporates a specific combination of two or more Zinc salts and also integrates specialised phase-stabilising additives to keep the chemical reactions controlled, stable, and non-flammable.

What are the cathode and anode materials?

Cathode: Coconut-shell activated carbon provides a massive, porous surface area to physically trap and stabilize oxidized bromine during charge. Conductive carbon blacks form the electrical network required for fast electron transport.

Anode (Anode-less): The cell is assembled without a zinc metal foil. On charge, zinc ions from the electrolyte plate directly onto a bare negative current collector. On discharge, this zinc layer strips completely back into the electrolyte.

How do you tackle dendrite formation?

Dendrite formation is tackled using proprietary additives to the electrolyte that act as leveling agents and grain refiners. They temporarily block microscopic high spots on the current collector, forcing incoming zinc ions to deposit evenly in the lower valleys. This lowers the nucleation overpotential, ensuring zinc plates as a dense, flat, and uniform layer rather than forming chaotic, needle-like dendrites.

Is there Hydrogen Evolution Reaction, and if so, how is it handled?

HER is tackled using a near-neutral electrolyte base and proprietary additives that suppress water reactivity. By tightly binding “free” water molecules within the electrolyte and anode surface energy, this combination expands the stable electrochemical voltage window of the system. This effectively prevents water from splitting, minimising hydrogen gas evolution and internal pressure buildup.

For how many hours has the battery been tested? A comment on the availability of Bromide?

The battery has undergone extensive long-duration testing protocol hours in-house using global standards and has been validated by leading third-party certification agencies like Intertek to ensure long-term cyclic stability and safety.

Bromine is highly abundant, cost-effective, and geographically secure. Crucially, it is heavily extracted from massive, highly concentrated domestic brine resources like the Rann of Kutch in India. This localised, abundant supply chain eliminates any reliance on scarce or politically volatile critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, or nickel.

Published on July 8, 2026

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Two faces of water

by Hansraj Agrawal | Jun 28, 2026 | Science

Water is one of the most familiar substances on Earth. We drink it, bathe in it and sail across it. Yet, after centuries of study, scientists are still scratching their heads over its strange behaviour.

Almost every liquid becomes denser as it cools. Water does too — but only up to about 4°C. Cool it further and it starts expanding, which is why ice floats. Water also stores heat unusually well and behaves oddly under pressure. For decades, scientists have wondered whether these quirks have a common explanation.

Now, researchers say they may have finally found evidence to settle a long-debated idea: Water constantly flips between two microscopic structures — a high-density and a low-density form. The trick was in persuading artificial intelligence to look where humans couldn’t.

Researchers at the City University of Hong Kong simulated the movements of thousands of water molecules, generating millions of data points. Instead of telling an AI system which patterns to search for, they let it teach itself — a technique known as unsupervised deep learning. The AI sifted through the mountains of data and picked out signatures that scientists say support the “two-state” model of water.

According to the researchers, AI accomplished in about 18 months what may otherwise have taken years of painstaking analysis.

If the findings hold up, they could help explain why water has puzzled scientists for so long. It would also serve as yet another reminder that even the most ordinary things can hide extraordinary secrets — provided someone knows where, and how to look.

Published on June 29, 2026

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