India Poised To Become World’s First Electrostate?

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When Richard Nixon went to China to meet with Mao Zedong, that country was still struggling to repair the damage from Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The vast majority of its more that 860 million people were living a mostly subsistence existence. Many historians believe Nixon’s primary purpose for the visit was to pry open its economy so US manufacturers could sell their products there. The US was the Colossus of the global economy and hungry for new markets to conquer.

But China was not content to simply buy stuff from others. Nixon’s visit was the spark that lit the fuse on its ambitions to manufacture many of those products domestically. In order to power new factories, it needed electricity and plenty of it. The Chinese government may have been communist at heart, but it understood the first principals of capitalism very well — cost is everything. And so, it made a decision to focus on what at the time was the fastest and cheapest way to generate electricity — coal-fired thermal generating stations.

Coal did the trick. China’s economy grew at an unheard of pace. Factories sprang up everywhere, as did new modern cities. Today, it has more than 100 cities with more than 1 million inhabitants. The US has 9. But China’s economic expansion came with a cost — air so thick with smog and industrial pollutants that when the Olympics were scheduled to take place in Beijing in 2008, the government took extraordinary measures to clear its skies before the world came to visit.

Since then, China has become the world leader in renewable energy technologies. Although it has hundreds of coal-fired generating stations still in use, many of them are used less than half the time and more have a capacity factor of under 30 percent. Nevertheless, China built its Industrial Revolution on coal and still relies on it for much of its electrical power.

Today, China’s population is shrinking. According to the South China Morning Post, its birthrate fell by 17 percent in 2025 to the lowest level since 1949 and its population decreased by 3.4 million people. At the same time, the population of India has been surging and is set to surpass that of China shortly if it has not done so already.

India Is Where China Was

Economically, India is in much the same place as China was two decades ago. It has a growing economy, but lacks the sophistication China enjoys. Like China, India is hungry for more electrical power. But according to the latest study from Ember, it plans to get there very differently than China did. Where China leaned on coal, India is embracing renewables and is on a trajectory to become the world’s first electrostate.

Using data from the World Bank for GDP, Ember for electricity, and the IEA for energy balances, the Ember report says: “India is forging a better path to the electrotech future of energy. Cheap solar and batteries are enabling India to develop without the long fossil detour taken by the West and China. In 2012, China had negligible solar generation. In 2025, solar accounted for 9 percent of India’s electricity generation, up from half a percent a decade earlier. India has a powerful new tool to scale cheap power, and it is using it to spectacular effect.

“India’s per capita coal generation, at 1 MWh, is roughly 40 percent of what it was in China in 2012. Coal demand is approaching its peak and is very unlikely to follow China’s subsequent ramp-up to around 4 MWh per person. By mid-2025, EVs accounted for around 5 percent of car sales in India and the country is the global leader in electric three-wheeler sales. India’s per capita road oil demand, at 96 liters, is about half of China’s level in 2012 and is close to peaking. India is not going to rescue the oil industry. [Emphasis added.]

“India’s electrification rate is nearly 20 percent — comparable to China’s level in 2012 — and is growing relentlessly by around five percentage points per decade. The benefits to India are substantial. This energy path avoids deep fossil fuel dependency while positioning the country to supply electrotech to the world. India is showing other countries how to take a cheaper, faster, cleaner pathway to the electrotech future.”

The US, on the other hand, is bullying other countries into taking a more expensive, slower, and dirtier pathway to a dystopian future in which humans die sooner than necessary in order to quench the insatiable greed of fossil fuel and utility companies.

The Ember Report

Here is the introduction to the Ember report:

“Many compare India and China’s energy systems as they stand today. From this perspective, China is ahead in most new energy metrics, from solar capacity to electrification. But the comparison has limits. China is at a later stage of development. China’s GDP in purchasing power terms is over double that of India; its electricity consumption is five times greater; its manufacturing output, in monetary terms, is nearly an order of magnitude larger.

“It is more reasonable to compare the two countries at equivalent levels of development. When we do so, a different story emerges. India is generating more solar electricity, burning far fewer fossil fuels, and electrifying transport faster than China did at an equivalent GDP per capita. [It] is harnessing some of the cheapest solar in the world [thanks to low cost Chinese made solar panels] to power its industrial rise and bypassing an expensive, insecure, fossil burning interlude. Where China and the West took the long road to the energy future, India is taking a shortcut.

“India’s shortcut has consequences, both at home and abroad. It offers a faster, cheaper route to growing electricity. It means greater energy sovereignty at an earlier stage of development. It can position India as a third pole of influence in a world where energy is being reshaped by electrotech and trade by Sino-American competition. Such advantages are not a foregone conclusion, but the signs are promising….The implication is that the energy pathway that makes economic sense for India today, as it rapidly industrializes, is not what made sense for China when it made the same journey.

“The energy revolution runs along two tracks. First, renewables coupled with battery storage are taking over electricity supply. Second, electricity is taking over energy demand; everything that can economically electrify will go electric, from transport to industry and buildings. On both fronts, India is achieving greater success at earlier stages of development. In all likelihood, India will reach $20,000 GDP per capita without coal generation ever exceeding the levels China was burning at $5,000.”

A Miracle

Bloomberg‘s Akshat Rathi says: “China’s rapid electrification has been hailed as a miracle. By some measures, India is even further ahead. The nation is electrifying faster and using fewer fossil fuels per capita than China did when it was at similar levels of economic development…. It’s a sign that clean electricity could be the most direct way to boost growth for other developing economies, too.

He quotes Kingsmill Bond, one of the authors of the Ember report, who says what is happening in India flies in the face of “the orthodox narrative that emerging markets must follow the same path the West and China took: go from biomass to fossil fuels.” Oh dear. You mean there might be a path to prosperity that does not depend on thermal generation from burning fossil fuels? Do the apparatchiks in the US administration know that? Can they even read?

India has not forsaken thermal generating entirely. Its government is considering plans that would double the output of coal power by 2047, and its oil consumption growth was higher than China’s last year. But on a per capita basis, its coal and oil consumption is a fraction of what China’s was at similar income levels. In absolute terms, India’s fossil fuel consumption is growing at slower rates than China’s is today.

The main differentiating factor is that India has access to solar panels and electric cars at a much lower price than China did a decade ago. Chinese investments lowered the costs of what experts call “modular technologies” — the production of solar panels, battery cells, and electric cars enabled engineers to learn how to make them more efficiently. Some would call that economies of scale.

Electrostates

The Ember researchers argue that countries such as India that don’t have significant domestic fossil fuel reserves will become “electrostates” that meet most of their energy needs through electricity generated from clean sources. No country has attained that status yet, Bond said, but more countries are turning to green electricity to power their economies. Nations that are less developed than India will see even more advantages as the cost of electricity technologies, from solar panels and electric vehicles to battery components and minerals, continue to fall.

The proof of Ember’s predictions can be seen in other countries, such as Pakistan and South Africa, both of which are taking advantage of low cost solar panels from China to leapfrog over the fossil fuel generation of electricity. Readers should note that in many instances, China is helping to finance these transitions in order to expand the market for its clean energy products.

That’s a narrative that cuts both ways. This month, India’s Reliance Industries put its plans to make lithium-ion battery cells domestically on hold after it failed to secure the necessary production equipment from China. Bond acknowledged that these risks could grow as trade becomes more contentious and slow down electrification. Conversely, if countries like India find ways to grow electrotech manufacturing without absolute dependence on Chinese equipment, electrification could speed up further. The course of international trade never did run smooth.

The fault line in the clean energy transition is that if one country dominates an industry, that gives it enormous leverage over how a particular technology expands in other countries. The latest example is how China’s virtual stranglehold on rare earth materials is forcing other nations, including the US, to play China’s game whether they choose to or not. Those who have power are seldom willing to give it up.