Bulgaria doubled its battery storage in a year. What it could mean for India

What happenedBulgaria's battery storage, from about 3 GW to 6 GW in a year

On 23 October 2026, Reuters reported from Sofia and Athens that Bulgaria has doubled its battery capacity in a year. The report, by Alex Lefkowitz and Angeliki Koutantou, puts the country's storage at about 6 GW today, against 3 GW a year ago. It says €700 million in European Union grants, along with changes to the rules, helped draw in private investment.

The batteries let Bulgaria store solar power made during the day and release it at the evening peak. This year, its power exports are up 62 per cent on last year, to 3.5 TWh (350 crore units, our conversion), according to figures from an industry group, the Association for Production, Storage and Trading of Electricity (APSTE). Dimitar Zarchev, head of Central Dispatch Management at Bulgaria's Electricity System Operator, said the country has exported as much as 50,000 MWh in a day (5 crore units, our conversion), with about 2,000 MW flowing out every hour on average, roughly the output of Bulgaria's Kozloduy nuclear plant.

Reuters says the batteries helped those exports supply neighbouring countries when heatwaves in July and August left their grids struggling with demand. Some of the power went to Romania, which had to shut a nuclear reactor in August after a drought. Next door in Greece, total storage is expected to reach about 1 GW by the end of the year, according to government figures cited in the report.

The same report carries a caution. Price spreads have narrowed, which cuts what batteries can earn from the gap between the price when they charge and the price when they discharge. Bulgaria's Energy Ministry told Reuters that batteries “may begin to cannibalise part of their revenues”, and that it would then matter even more for them to earn from balancing the grid and other system services, not only from the gap between cheap and costly hours.

One thing the report does not give is how long Bulgaria's batteries can run. A GW figure is how much power batteries can give at once, like the width of a tap; a GWh figure is how much they hold, like the size of the tank. Reuters gives the first, not the second.