pv magazine India inside Su-vastika’s Gurugram farmhouse-factory — where Kunwer Sachdev has cut a Rs 1.75-lakh diesel bill to Rs 3,000, filed 60 patents, and built India’s first cell-level lithium tester.
pv magazine India’s Uma Gupta drops in on Su-vastika Systems — the Gurugram-based solar-inverter and battery-storage company mentored by Kunwer Sachdev, founder of the Su-Kam brand of inverters. In four years, Su-vastika has filed about 60 technology patents, been awarded 9, and now exports 90 per cent of what it makes.
Semi-automated machines, targeting Rs 100 crore in exports
Sachdev tells pv magazine the company is targeting Rs 100 crore in exports for the fiscal, backed by semi-automated / automated machines it has designed in-house to keep human intervention low across production stages — wire cutting, core stacking for transformers, and the rest of the transformer line.
The Rs 1.75 lakh diesel bill, cut to Rs 3,000
The showpiece Uma Gupta walks through is Su-vastika’s new 80 kW lithium battery storage system, which the company is pilot-testing at its own factory. The factory runs a 110 kVA load, and the battery is paired with a 125 kVA diesel generator as fallback. In practice, the generator almost never starts.
“Installing the system has helped us to reduce our monthly diesel bill to just INR 3,000 from INR 1.75 lakh.”— Kunwer Sachdev to pv magazine India • 2 May 2023
Storage that doesn’t need the grid
Sachdev’s design philosophy for the storage system is deliberate: don’t depend on grid feed. Add a charge controller and the same battery is charged directly from rooftop solar. And unlike systems that need a full charge before dispatching, Su-vastika’s pack starts powering the load as soon as the battery reaches 25 per cent — a real difference for households and small businesses used to waiting hours for backup to kick in.
India’s first cell-level lithium battery tester
The second new product Uma Gupta highlights is the company’s lithium battery tester, which Su-vastika claims is the first made-in-India product capable of testing a battery storage system at the cell level. Sachdev’s framing is technical: the main reason batteries fail is voltage imbalance across the cells in the pack, and the tester lets you catch that per-cell — not just at the pack terminals.
LFP, not NMC — and why the EV-fire industry agrees now
Su-vastika is banking on lithium ferro phosphate (LFP) cells over higher-density chemistries like NMC because LFP is markedly safer. Sachdev points to the recent electric-scooter fire incidents in India: those were mostly NMC-based, chosen for high density and compact size. After the fires, he tells pv magazine, “almost all have switched back to LFP chemistry.” Su-vastika’s bet was made before the industry moved.
Retrofit lead-acid inverters — and make any inverter solar-ready
The last thread of the article is retrofit. Su-vastika, Sachdev says, can make any existing lead-acid-battery inverter lithium-compatible by adding a battery management system, and it can make a standard inverter solar-compatible by adding a charge-controller module. That is the operating pitch: don’t make households throw away their inverters, upgrade them — and shift the country’s installed base to a cleaner, longer-lived storage layer without a rip-and-replace.
What’s cooking in a farmhouse factory — pv magazine India →