This article is authored by Navneet Daga, Co-founder & CEO, Zenergize.India’s EV story, on the surface, looks like a success. Public charging stations have grown nearly sixfold in under three years. EV sales witnessed a 19% increase over the prior year. The government has committed ₹10,900 crore under PM E-DRIVE to accelerate the transition. But a recent Observer Research Foundation report found that India’s EV-to-charger ratio stands at 1:235, against a global benchmark of 6 to 20. And 38% of EV users still cite unreliable charging as a major barrier to adoption. The numbers tell a story of rapid deployment, not reliable infrastructure. So clearly India doesn’t have an EV adoption problem. It has a charging reliability problem.
The Performance Gap Nobody Is Measuring
Here’s a question the industry doesn’t yet have a clean answer to: when a fast charger is rated at 60 kW, how much power does it actually deliver on a 46°C afternoon in Delhi? The answer, for most chargers currently deployed across India, is 38-42kW.The majority of fast chargers in the mid-market segment today are built on silicon IGBT (Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor) architecture, a mature, cost-effective technology designed and optimised for operating environments in Europe, East Asia, and North America, where peak summer temperatures rarely exceed 35°C. When ambient temperatures climb to 45-50°C, which is a routine occurrence across large parts of India from March through June, these systems approach their thermal design limits. The engineering response is automatic and intentional: output power is reduced to protect components. This is called thermal derating. The charger stays on. Drivers can plug in. But the 60 kW session becomes a 38-42 kW session, and nobody, not the driver, not the operator, not the fleet manager, knows this is happening.This is not a fringe problem. It is a structural one. And it matters because India is not building charging infrastructure for today’s 27,000 stations, it is building the foundation for the volumes required to hit 30% private car EV penetration and 80% two- and three-wheeler penetration by 2030.
A Design Flaw, Not a Maintenance Failure
It’s easy to frame charging reliability as a maintenance problem. But thermal derating is not a maintenance failure. A charger that derates during a heatwave in Rajasthan is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do in conditions it was never designed for.The real question is what is the right technology foundation for charging infrastructure deployed in a climate like India’s?Silicon IGBTs have an inherent limitation that becomes consequential in high-ambient environments. As junction temperatures rise, switching losses increase, generating more internal heat, which in turn raises temperatures further.Silicon Carbide (SiC) MOSFET architecture addresses this at the source.SiC MOSFETs achieve system efficiencies of up to 98.5%, compared to approximately 96% for conventional IGBT designs. To put that concretely: in a 60 kW IGBT-based charger, roughly 2.4 kW is lost as heat during operation. In a SiC-based equivalent, that figure drops to under 900 W, which is 60% less heat generated within the system. In Indian summers, where outdoor temperatures regularly exceed 45°C from March through June, that difference is decisive. Less internal heat means the charger’s cooling systems are under less strain, components run further below their thermal limits, and the system has far more headroom before it needs to throttle output to protect itself.The practical implications for SiC MOSFETs for Indian operating environments:Maintained rated output regardless of ambient temperature. A SiC-based charger designed for Indian conditions can sustain rated power delivery at 55°C ambient.Lower internal thermal load. Reduced switching losses mean less energy is dissipated as heat within the system. This lowers the burden on cooling mechanisms, extends component life, and improves long-term reliability.Greater headroom before protective throttling. Because the system operates further below its thermal ceiling under normal conditions, it has more capacity to absorb extreme events.
What “Climate-Ready” Infrastructure Actually Means
Deploying climate-ready EV charging infrastructure is not primarily about tolerating heat; it is about designing for the operating conditions that are normal in India, rather than treating them as edge cases.This requires rethinking several things simultaneously:Specifying for real operating conditions. Charger procurement today is largely driven by specifications measured under standard lab conditions. Procurement frameworks need to evolve to include thermal derating curves, rated output at 45°C and 50°C ambient.Building thermal performance into station economics. Operators building business cases around sessions-per-day and revenue-per-unit need accurate performance data across the full temperature range their stations will experience. Treating uptime and delivered performance as separate metrics. A charger that is powered on and physically available but delivering 60% of rated output is, for practical purposes, partially offline.
The Bigger Picture
India’s EV transition is one of the most consequential infrastructure programmes underway anywhere in the world. The targets to achieve, 70% EV penetration for commercial vehicles, 30% for private cars, 80% for two and three-wheelers by 2030, require not just deploying chargers at scale, but deploying chargers that work reliably under real Indian conditions at scale.The industry has made extraordinary progress on deployment velocity. The next phase of maturity is about deployment quality: ensuring that what gets built actually performs as intended, in May and June as reliably as in November and December, on a highway corridor in Rajasthan as dependably as in a climate-controlled parking structure in Bengaluru.That is the infrastructure India’s EV transition deserves. And it is entirely achievable, with the right engineering choices made now, before the network is ten times larger than it is today. Disclaimer: Views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the original author and do not represent any of The Times Group or its employees.
