This article is written by Navneet Daga, Co-Founder and CEO, Zenergize.India’s EV story, on the surface, looks like a success. Public charging stations have grown nearly sixfold in less than three years. EV sales saw a 19 percent increase over the previous year. The government has committed ₹ 10,900 crore under the PME drive to accelerate the transition. But a recent Observer Research Foundation report found that India’s EV-to-charger ratio is 1:235, compared to the global standard of 6 to 20. And 38 percent of EV customers still cite unreliable charging as a major barrier to adoption. The data tells the story of rapid deployment, not reliable infrastructure. So clearly EV adoption is not a problem in India. It has a charging reliability issue.
No one is measuring the performance difference.
Here’s a question the industry still doesn’t have a clear answer to: When a fast charger is rated at 60 kW, how much power does it really deliver on a 46-degree-C Delhi afternoon? The answer, for most chargers currently deployed across India, is 38-42kW.Most fast chargers in the mid-market today are built on silicon IGBT (insulated gate bipolar transistor) architecture, a mature, cost-effective technology designed and optimized for operating environments in Europe, East Asia and North America, where peak summer temperatures rarely exceed 35°C. When the ambient temperature reaches 45-50°C, which is typical in large parts of India from March to June, these systems reach their thermal design limits. The engineering response is automatic and deliberate: the output power is reduced to protect the components. This is called thermal derating. The charger continues to run. Drivers can plug in. But a 60 kW session becomes a 38-42 kW session, and no one knows, not the driver, not the operator, not the fleet manager, that this is happening.This is not a fridge problem. It is a construct. And this matters because India is not building the charging infrastructure for today’s 27,000 stations, it is building the volume base needed for 30% private car EV penetration and 80% two- and three-wheeler penetration by 2030.
Design defect, not failure of maintenance.
It’s easy to frame charging reliability as a maintenance issue. But thermal derating is not a recovery failure. A derating charger is not broken during the heat wave in Rajasthan. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do under conditions it was never designed for.The real question is what is the right technology base for charging infrastructure deployed in a climate like India?Silicon IGBTs have an inherent limitation in being effective in high ambient environments. As the junction temperature increases, switching losses increase, generating more internal heat, which in turn increases the temperature further.Silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFET architecture addresses this at the source.SiC MOSFETs achieve system efficiencies of up to 98.5%, compared to around 96% for conventional IGBT designs. To put it concretely: in a 60 kW IGBT-based charger, about 2.4 kW is lost as heat during operation. In a SiC-based equivalent, this figure drops to less than 900 W, which is 60% less than the heat generated within the system. In the Indian summer, where outside temperatures regularly exceed 45 °C between March and June, this difference is decisive. Low internal heat means the charger’s cooling systems are under less stress, components run below their thermal limits, and the system has a lot more headroom before it needs to throttle output to protect itself.Practical implications of SiC MOSFETs for Indian operating environment:Maintains rated output regardless of ambient temperature. A SiC-based charger designed for Indian conditions can maintain rated power delivery in an ambient of 55°C.Low internal thermal load. Low switching losses mean that less energy is lost as heat within the system. This reduces the load on the cooling mechanism, extends component life, and improves long-term reliability.Larger headroom before safety throttling. Because the system operates further below its thermal ceiling under normal conditions, it has a greater capacity to absorb extreme events.
What does “climate ready” infrastructure actually mean?
Deploying a climate-ready EV charging infrastructure isn’t primarily about tolerating the heat. It’s about designing for operating conditions that are typical in India, rather than treating them as edge cases.This requires a simultaneous rethinking of several things:Specifying actual operating conditions. Charger purchases today are largely based on specifications measured under standard lab conditions. The procurement framework needs to be developed to include thermal derating curves, output rated at 45°C and 50°C ambient.Building thermal efficiency in station economics. Operators building business cases around sessions per day and revenue per unit need accurate performance data across the temperature range that their stations will experience. Treating uptime and deliverability as separate metrics. A charger that is on and physically available but delivers 60% rated output is, for practical purposes, partially offline.
The big picture
India’s EV transition is one of the most productive infrastructure programs underway anywhere in the world. Achieving targets of 70% EV for commercial vehicles, 30% for private cars, 80% for two and three wheelers by 2030, requires not only deployment of chargers at scale, but deployment of chargers that work reliably in real Indian conditions at scale.The industry has made phenomenal progress on the speed of deployment. The next stage of maturity is about quality of deployment: ensuring that what is built actually performs as intended, as reliably in May and June as in November and December, on a highway corridor in Rajasthan as in a climate-controlled parking structure in Bengaluru.This is the infrastructure that India’s EV transition deserves. And it’s entirely achievable, before the network is ten times larger than it is today, with the right engineering choices. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the original author and do not represent those of The Times Group or its employees.
