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India is deploying clean electricity more rapidly and consuming far less coal and oil per person than China did, as per Ember.
With the US and Europe increasingly restricting Chinese-linked clean-energy technologies, countries such as India now have stronger incentives to invest in local manufacturing.
India is electrifying its economy at a faster pace, and with lower fossil-fuel use per person, than China did at a comparable stage of development, according to a new report by energy think tank Ember, Bloomberg reported.
The findings challenge the long-held assumption that emerging economies must follow the same energy trajectory as advanced nations, shifting first from biomass to fossil fuels before transitioning to clean energy.
“That flies against ‘the orthodox narrative that emerging markets must follow the same path the West and China took: go from biomass to fossil fuels,'” said Kingsmill Bond, a strategist at Ember and one of the report’s authors.
To make a like-for-like comparison, Ember adjusted gross domestic product for purchasing power, placing India’s current per-capita income of about $11,000 at the same level as China’s in 2012. At that income level, India is deploying clean electricity more rapidly and consuming far less coal and oil per person than China did.
India continues to rely heavily on fossil fuels, even as renewable capacity expands. The government is weighing plans that could double coal-fired power capacity by 2047, while oil demand growth in the country was expected to outpace China’s last year.
Still, Ember’s analysis shows that India’s coal and oil consumption per capita remains a fraction of China’s at a similar development stage. Even in absolute terms, India’s fossil-fuel consumption is rising more slowly than China’s today.
The report attributes this trend largely to the availability of low-cost solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles, technologies that are now far cheaper than they were a decade ago. Those cost declines stem from China’s earlier investments in what experts call “modular technologies”, where mass production steadily drives efficiency gains.
In India, electric vehicles accounted for 5% of new car sales in 2024. At the same point in its development, China’s per-capita oil consumption for road transport was about 60% higher. As a result, Bond said India’s road-transport oil demand per person may never reach Chinese levels.
Bond and his colleagues argue that countries like India, which lack large domestic fossil-fuel reserves, are likely to evolve into “electrostates”, meeting most of their energy needs through electricity generated from clean sources.
No country qualifies as an electrostate yet, Bond said, but developing economies stand to benefit the most as the costs of solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries and critical minerals continue to decline.
Neither India nor China is pursuing electrification primarily to meet climate targets, Bond said. Instead, the shift is being driven by economics — particularly for India, which imports more than 40% of its primary energy in the form of coal, oil and gas, according to the International Energy Agency.
“To grow and have energy independence, India needs to reduce the terrible burden of fossil-fuel imports worth $150 billion each year,” said Bond. “India needs to find other solutions.”
The report also flags potential risks. China’s dominance in manufacturing electricity technologies, from batteries to solar equipment, could become a bottleneck for other countries. Beijing has already leveraged that position geopolitically, including in trade negotiations involving rare earths.
Chinese firms also control much of the equipment required to set up manufacturing facilities elsewhere. This has already posed challenges for India. This month, Reliance Industries Ltd. paused plans to manufacture lithium-ion battery cells domestically after failing to secure critical equipment from China.
Bond acknowledged that rising trade tensions could slow electrification globally. However, he said that if countries like India succeed in building domestic manufacturing capacity without relying entirely on Chinese suppliers, the transition could accelerate.
With the US and Europe increasingly restricting Chinese-linked clean-energy technologies, countries such as India now have stronger incentives to invest in local manufacturing.
“We are probably at a moment of peak Chinese dominance in the electrotech system, as the rest of the world starts to wake up and realise that this is the energy future,” Bond said.
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January 23, 2026, 08:27 IST
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