This article is written by Navneet Daga, Co-Founder and CEO, Zenergize.India’s EV story appears to be a success on the surface. Public charging stations have increased nearly sixfold in less than three years. EV sales saw a growth of 19% compared to the previous year. The government has promised ₹10,900 crore under PM e-Drive to accelerate the transformation. But a recent Observer Research Foundation report found that India’s EV-to-charger ratio is 1:235, while the global benchmark is 6:20. And 38% of EV users still cite unreliable charging as a major barrier to adoption. The figures tell a story not of reliable infrastructure, but of rapid deployment. So clearly there is no problem of EV adoption in India. There is a problem of charging reliability.
No one is measuring the performance difference
Here’s a question the industry doesn’t yet have a clear answer to: When a fast charger is rated at 60 kW, how much power does it actually provide on a 46°C afternoon in Delhi? Most chargers currently deployed across India answer 38-42kW.Most 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 optimized for operating environments in Europe, East Asia and North America, where summer peak temperatures rarely exceed 35 °C. When ambient temperatures climb to 45–50 °C, which is a regular occurrence in large parts of India from March to June, these systems reach their thermal design limits. The engineering response is automatic and deliberate: output power is reduced to protect the components. This is called thermal derating. The charger remains on. Drivers can plug in. But a 60kWh session becomes a 38-42kWh session, and no one, not the driver, not the operator, not the fleet manager, knows it’s happening.This is not a marginal problem. This is a structural one. And this matters because India is not just building the charging infrastructure for 27,000 stations today, it is building the foundation for the volume needed for 30% private car EV penetration and 80% two-wheeler and three-wheeler penetration by 2030.
A design flaw, not a maintenance failure
Charging reliability is easy to define as a maintenance issue. But thermal derived maintenance is not a failure. The charger which got damaged during heat wave in Rajasthan has not broken. It’s doing exactly what it was designed for in circumstances it was never designed for.The real question is what is the right technology base for deployed charging infrastructure in an environment like India?Silicon IGBTs have an inherent limitation that becomes consequential in high-amplitude environments. As the junction temperature increases, switching losses increase, generating more internal heat, resulting in further temperature increases.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 it concretely: in a 60 kW IGBT-based charger, about 2.4 kW is dissipated as heat during operation. In the SiC-based counterpart, this figure drops to 900 W, which is 60% less heat generated within the system. In the Indian summer, where outdoor temperatures regularly exceed 45 °C from March to June, this difference is decisive. Less internal heat means the charger’s cooling systems are under less stress, components run below their thermal limits, and the system has far more headroom before it needs to throttle output to protect itself.Practical implications of SiC MOSFETs for Indian operating environments:Rated output maintained regardless of ambient temperature. The SiC-based charger designed for Indian conditions can maintain rated power delivery in 55°C ambient.Reduce internal thermal load. Lower switching losses mean that less energy is wasted as heat within the system. This reduces the load on the cooling system, extends component life, and improves long-term reliability.More headroom before protective throttling. Because the system operates below its thermal ceiling under normal conditions, it has a greater capacity to absorb extreme events.
What does “climate ready” infrastructure really mean?
Deploying climate-ready EV charging infrastructure is not primarily about tolerating the heat; It is about designing for operating conditions that are common in India, not treating them as edge cases.This requires rethinking several things simultaneously:To specify for actual operating conditions. Charger purchases today are largely driven by specifications measured under standard laboratory conditions. The procurement framework needs to be developed to include thermal derivative curves, output rated at 45°C and 50°C ambient.Building thermal performance into station economy. Operators building business cases around sessions-per-day and revenue-per-unit need accurate performance data over the full temperature range experienced by their stations. Treating uptime and distributed performance as separate metrics. A charger that is operational and physically available but providing 60% of rated output is, for practical purposes, partially offline.
big picture
India’s EV transition is one of the most consequential infrastructure programs underway anywhere in the world. Achieving the target of 70% EV penetration for commercial vehicles, 30% for private cars, 80% for two-wheelers and three-wheelers by 2030 requires not only deploying chargers on a large scale, but also deploying chargers that work reliably in real Indian conditions on a large scale.The industry has made extraordinary progress on deployment velocity. The next stage of maturity is about the quality of deployment: ensuring that what is built actually works as well in May and June as it does in November and December, on a highway corridor in Rajasthan and a climate-controlled parking structure in Bengaluru.This is the infrastructure that India’s EV transformation deserves. And this is entirely achievable, with the right engineering choices, before the network becomes ten times larger than it is today. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the original author and do not represent the Times Group or any of its employees.
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