India's Energy Sector Looks 97% China-Free. Its Batteries Are 75% Chinese.

Measured as a whole, energy is the least China-dependent sector in India's import economy. Of roughly $228 billion in energy-category imports in FY2024-25, only 2.8% came from China.

That number is true and almost completely useless.

It is dominated by crude oil and coal, which India buys from the Gulf, Russia and Indonesia. Averaged across that denominator, everything else disappears. Zoom to the product line that actually matters for the next twenty years and the picture inverts:

Lithium-ion cells and batteries: $2.26 billion imported from China in FY2024-25, out of $3.01 billion worldwide. 75.2%.

Alongside it: electric inverters 72.4% Chinese, parts of electrical power machinery 72.0%, parts of rotating electrical plant 69.2%, single-phase AC motors 90.2%, battery chargers 68.3%.

Every physical component of India's electrification — storage, conversion, motors — is majority-Chinese. The sector average says 2.8% because it is measuring a different economy: the fossil one India is trying to leave.

This is the clearest case in our whole dataset for why sector-level import figures mislead, and why the unit of analysis has to be the product.

The good news, which is real

Here is where energy departs from every other sector we've examined.

In semiconductors, the import bill and the domestic patent base pointed in different directions. In communications, the patents belonged to foreign firms. In industrial automation, the startups were building software while the imports were compressors.

In energy, everything lines up.

The top patent sub-themes in India's energy sector, in order: battery thermal management (475), battery materials (256), battery safety (209), battery manufacturing (182), battery technology (181), battery recycling (145), battery separators (134), battery management systems (123).

Eight of the top ten are batteries. Not "energy" in the abstract — cathode chemistry, separators, thermal runaway, pack manufacturing. Precisely the engineering standing between India and the $2.26 billion it sends to China for cells.

The capital matches. $1.75 billion raised across 343 funded companies — second only to health and life sciences. And it is going to the right places: Waaree ESS ($115M, lithium-ion cells and packs), FuelON ($65.1M, lithium batteries for EVs and storage), LOHUM ($63M, battery recycling and critical-minerals recovery), GoodEnough Energy ($49.4M, grid-scale battery energy storage systems).

Indian inventors also out-file foreigners here — 5,255 domestic filings against 4,953 foreign in 2024 — with TVS Motor (182 filings), BHEL (126) and Matter Motor Works (84) leading domestically, and IIT Madras and IIT Bombay among the strongest institutional filers in the country on this subject.

If you were designing an import-substitution opportunity from scratch, it would look like this: a large, growing, strategically critical import line, with domestic patents, domestic companies and real capital already aimed at it.

The bad news, which is worse

India has been trying to build this for five years. The results are not close to the ambition.

The Production Linked Incentive scheme for Advanced Chemistry Cells targeted 50 GWh of domestic battery manufacturing capacity by 2025, with an outlay of ₹181 billion (about $2.08 billion).

As of October 2025, delivered capacity was 1.4 GWh — 2.8% of target — from a single company, Ola Electric, which has since scaled back its own commitment from 20 GWh to 5 GWh by FY2029. Committed investment stood at roughly a quarter of what was planned. No incentives had been disbursed. Employment reached 1,118 against a projected million-plus. And in the assessment's own words, India's dependence on imported battery cells remains "close to 100%."

Read that against the import figure and the two are consistent: 75.2% of cells from China, near-total dependence on imports overall, and a domestic manufacturing programme that has delivered under three percent of what it promised in the time allotted.

So the alignment we just praised is alignment of intent. Patents, startups and capital are all pointed at batteries. Actual cells coming off actual Indian lines: 1.4 GWh.

Someone else is already filing here

One detail from the patent data deserves attention from anyone treating this as an open field.

The single largest patent filer in India's energy sector is LG Energy Solution, with 2,225 filings — nearly ten times the largest domestic corporate filer. Behind it: Ningde Amperex Technology (358 filings), an affiliate of CATL, the world's largest battery manufacturer, and Xiamen Hithium Energy Storage (315 filings), a major Chinese storage cell maker.

Chinese and Korean cell manufacturers are building patent positions in India at scale — in a market where they currently supply three-quarters of the cells and India manufactures almost none.

That is what securing a market ahead of competition looks like. Whatever India eventually builds domestically will be built in an IP landscape these firms are actively shaping right now, while the domestic capacity to challenge it does not yet exist. The patents are being filed years before the factories.

What we'd take from this

• Sector averages actively hide this problem. Energy reads as 2.8% China-dependent and is 75.2% dependent on the one input its future runs on. Any analysis operating at sector level will miss this entirely — ours did, until we broke it to product level.
• This is the best-aligned opportunity in the dataset, and it is still not working. Patents, companies and capital are all correctly aimed. Manufacturing output is at 2.8% of target. That gap is not an idea problem or a talent problem; it is a capital-intensity-and-execution problem, and it should temper how quickly anyone expects import substitution to show up in trade data even under favourable conditions.
• The IP clock is running. Foreign cell makers are filing heavily in India now. The cost of entering later is rising while domestic capacity stalls.

The optimistic reading is that India has done the hard part — building the knowledge base and attracting the capital — and needs execution. The pessimistic reading is that five years and ₹181 billion of committed incentives produced 1.4 GWh, and the constraint was never knowledge.

Both readings fit the data. We'd hold them together rather than pick.

Methodology

Import figures are FY2024-25 from India's Trade Intelligence & Analytics Portal at HS8 level. The energy sector maps HS chapter 27 (mineral fuels) plus HS headings 8501-8504 and 8507 (motors, generators, transformers, converters, accumulators). Chapter 27 dominates the sector total, which is why the aggregate China share is low and why the product-level figures are the meaningful ones here — the aggregate is reported above specifically to show how misleading it is.

Eight-year trends are from CEPII BACI V202601 (India as importer, HS6, 2017-2024), where BACI and TIA agree on this sector's China share to within 0.1 percentage points. Patent, startup and funding figures are Deeptech Navigator's registry as of 2026-07-22; filer country reflects the recorded filing entity and does not always track ultimate ownership, which matters when reading affiliate structures like Ningde Amperex.

ACC PLI scheme figures are from IEEFA's assessment as of October 2025 and are that organisation's analysis, not government reporting — they are the most specific public accounting we found, and we'd treat the direction as solid and individual figures as one analyst's read.

In our data

Sources

• CEPII BACI V202601 ↗
• Only 2.8% of target capacity delivered yet under India's battery manufacturing incentive scheme — IEEFA ↗
• Securing India's battery supply chain is more critical than ever — IEEFA ↗
• India's battery materials boom runs ahead of EV cell production amid Chinese tech curbs — Automotive Manufacturing Solutions ↗