India’s EV Charging Market Is Moving From Charger Count to Energy Throughput

The 9AM Show | Tuesday: EV Charging Infrastructure

All India EV Intelligence | 17–23 August 2026

For much of India’s EV transition, charging infrastructure has been evaluated through one dominant metric: the number of charging stations installed.

That metric was useful when the market was trying to answer a basic infrastructure question: Are enough chargers being built? But as EV penetration rises and commercial electric mobility expands, charger count alone is becoming increasingly inadequate for measuring the maturity of the charging ecosystem.

The more important question now is whether those chargers are actually being used.

Data released during the past week provides one of the clearest indications yet that this transition has begun. Electricity consumption through public EV charging infrastructure increased from 848 million units in FY25 to 1,460 million units in FY26, representing growth of more than 72% year-on-year.

The composition of this demand is even more important. More than 74% of electricity consumed through public EV charging infrastructure during FY26 came from heavy-duty charging, including electric buses, commercial vehicles and other high-capacity EV applications. Light and medium-duty vehicles accounted for the remaining share.

This changes the way India’s charging infrastructure market should be viewed.

The industry is gradually moving away from a phase dominated by infrastructure availability and entering one where utilisation, energy throughput, uptime and power availability will determine the economic quality of charging assets.

And commercial electric mobility appears to be emerging as the anchor customer around which this next phase will develop.

Commercial EVs Are Becoming the Economic Backbone of Charging Infrastructure

One of the most important charging infrastructure announcements last week came from ChargeZone and Fresh Bus.

Fresh Bus plans to add another 400 electric intercity buses to ChargeZone’s charging ecosystem, increasing the number of buses supported by the partnership from 100 to approximately 500 electric buses.

However, the most relevant figure from an infrastructure perspective is not the fleet size. It is the power capacity being developed to support that fleet.

ChargeZone plans to add around 30 MW of dedicated charging capacity, taking the total capacity supporting Fresh Bus operations to approximately 40 MW. The expansion is expected to cover 20 cities and another 17 towns across Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana over the next 15 months.

At full deployment, the partners estimate that the charging network could dispense approximately 100 million units of electricity annually.

This type of charging project has fundamentally different economics from a conventional public charging station built primarily for passenger vehicles.

A highway charger serving private cars has uncertain demand. Utilisation depends on vehicle density, customer behaviour, route popularity, charging speed, competing networks and even seasonal travel patterns.

A charging facility developed for a commercial fleet operates within a more predictable demand environment.

Bus operators know their routes. Fleet size is known. Daily kilometres are broadly predictable. Charging schedules can be planned around operating hours, and the CPO has visibility into the potential energy requirement before the infrastructure is deployed.

That predictability can eventually become important for infrastructure financing as well.

A bank or infrastructure investor evaluating a large charging project backed by a contracted fleet can assess electricity demand, expected utilisation and revenue visibility more accurately than it can for a speculative public charging location.

This could gradually create two different charging investment models in India.

One will continue to focus on public networks serving private vehicles and highway traffic. The other will increasingly resemble energy infrastructure developed around contracted commercial mobility demand.

The second model may ultimately produce some of the highest-utilisation charging assets in the country.

Charger Count Is No Longer Enough

India now has a substantial public charging network on paper. Government data released earlier this year indicated that the country had more than 52,000 public charging stations, including thousands of fast-charging locations.

But the number reveals surprisingly little about the economic health of the network.

A 7.2 kW AC charger installed in a parking facility and a 360 kW DC charger operating on a busy highway can both be counted as charging infrastructure, even though their power requirements, investment costs, utilisation and electricity throughput are completely different.

Similarly, the presence of hardware at a site does not automatically mean that the charging station is commercially productive.

There are several stages between an announced charging project and a functioning energy asset:

• Announced: The charging project has been publicly proposed.
• Site identified: A location has been selected.
• Approved: Required government, land or utility permissions have been secured.
• Power sanctioned: The DISCOM has approved the required electricity connection.
• Installed: Charging equipment has physically reached the site.
• Commissioned: Electrical and technical integration has been completed.
• Operational: Customers can actively use the charging facility.
• Productive: The charger achieves sufficient utilisation to support sustainable economics.

Treating all these stages simply as “chargers deployed” can create a misleading picture of infrastructure development.

For CPOs and investors, the next generation of charging dashboards should therefore move beyond charger count and track metrics such as:

• installed and operational MW;
• electricity dispensed per charger;
• average daily and monthly utilisation;
• revenue generated per charging asset;
• charger uptime;
• average charging session duration;
• private versus commercial vehicle consumption;
• peak and off-peak utilisation;
• grid power sanctioned versus charger capacity installed; and
• capital expenditure per unit of electricity dispensed.

Charger count will remain useful, but it should increasingly become a secondary metric rather than the headline measure of charging-network maturity.

Bihar Shows the Expansion Pipeline

The infrastructure pipeline itself is still expanding rapidly.

During the week, Bihar started site surveys for 129 proposed EV charging stations across 23 districts. The initial survey programme included 72 identified locations across districts including Patna, Gaya, Vaishali, Purnia, Nalanda and Chhapra.

The assessment process reportedly includes land availability, electrical connectivity, accessibility and the technical suitability of proposed charging locations.

This is an important development because Bihar already has a sizeable EV population. The state had more than 5.1 lakh registered electric vehicles by July 2026.

However, the composition of that fleet is critical.

Around 3.37 lakh of those vehicles were e-rickshaws, while the number of electric passenger cars remained relatively small.

That creates an infrastructure-planning question that deserves more attention.

A state with hundreds of thousands of low-speed electric three-wheelers does not necessarily require the same charging architecture as a state where electric passenger cars dominate adoption.

The appropriate charging ecosystem may involve a combination of:

• distributed low-power charging;
• commercial three-wheeler charging locations;
• battery swapping;
• depot charging;
• high-power highway charging; and
• intercity fast-charging hubs.

Infrastructure planning therefore needs to follow vehicle behaviour and energy demand, rather than simply the total number of registered EVs.

The Bihar rollout will be particularly interesting to watch because it could demonstrate whether public charging programmes are becoming sophisticated enough to reflect the actual EV mix within individual states.

Nagpur Demonstrates the Execution Gap

While Bihar illustrates the size of the infrastructure pipeline, developments in Nagpur demonstrate how difficult it can be to convert charging plans into functioning assets.

Nagpur Municipal Corporation had originally planned 11 public charging locations through a public-private partnership.

Seven are operational, while four have either been delayed or dropped.

Three proposed sites reportedly faced local opposition, while another charging facility at Jaitala Y Point encountered issues involving trees and related approvals even after infrastructure work had progressed.

The lesson here is broader than Nagpur.

Installing a charger is one of the simpler parts of developing a charging station.

A functioning public charging facility may depend on coordination across several layers of infrastructure and governance, including:

• land availability;
• municipal permissions;
• DISCOM approvals;
• transformer capacity;
• electrical connections;
• civil works;
• parking access;
• traffic movement;
• environmental clearances; and
• community acceptance.

Any one of these can delay commissioning.

This is precisely why charging deployment statistics need clearer status classification.

An announced site is not an operational charger. An installed charger without grid connection is not charging infrastructure in any commercially meaningful sense.

As central and state governments accelerate public charging programmes, execution quality will become just as important as sanctioned numbers.

The Hardware Stack Is Preparing for Much Higher Power

Another important development during the week came from Exicom, which has started manufacturing liquid-cooled EV charging power modules at its Hyderabad facility and has begun exporting the technology to the United States.

The company says it invested approximately $3.5 million and nearly two years in developing the technology.

Exicom’s silicon-carbide-based liquid-cooled modules are designed for high-power charging applications and, according to the company, can deliver efficiency approaching 99%, compared with approximately 95-96% for conventional modules.

Liquid cooling matters because the technical challenge of charging increases sharply as power and current rise.

At relatively low charging power, air cooling is sufficient for most applications. But when charging systems begin operating at very high currents, thermal management becomes increasingly difficult.

Exicom itself expects conventional air-cooled chargers to continue dominating the Indian market in the immediate future. The company estimates that the domestic charging market could remain approximately 95% air-cooled and 5% liquid-cooled over the next couple of years.

That makes this less of an immediate domestic market shift and more of a signal about where the industry is preparing to go.

As electric buses, trucks and other heavy commercial vehicles scale, chargers will need to deliver substantially higher power within limited charging windows.

That will create demand for:

• higher-current charging cables;
• liquid-cooled connectors;
• more efficient power modules;
• stronger thermal-management systems;
• higher-capacity grid connections; and eventually
• megawatt-scale charging architecture.

The same trend visible in charging utilisation data is therefore beginning to appear in charging hardware development.

Commercial EVs are influencing both the economics and the engineering of charging infrastructure.

Grid Capacity May Become the Next Major Constraint

High-power chargers create another problem: the charger itself may be capable of delivering more power than the local electrical network can provide.

Huawei’s recently unveiled charging architecture offers an interesting example of how the global charging industry is beginning to solve this constraint.

The system combines an 800-amp liquid-cooled DC charger with battery energy storage, allowing the station to temporarily deliver charging power significantly higher than the capacity available from the grid connection.

This architecture is particularly relevant for markets such as India.

Building a high-power charging hub can require substantial upgrades to local distribution infrastructure. A CPO may want several hundred kilowatts or even multiple megawatts at a location, while the existing electricity connection may only support a fraction of that load.

Upgrading transformers, obtaining high-tension connections and strengthening distribution infrastructure can significantly increase both project cost and commissioning timelines.

Battery-buffered charging introduces another approach.

Instead of drawing all required power from the grid at the exact moment a vehicle plugs in, a battery energy-storage system can charge gradually and then release stored electricity when high-power charging demand appears.

The economics will not work everywhere because battery storage adds capital cost. But at locations where grid augmentation is expensive or slow, the model could become increasingly attractive.

This is why the charging station of the future may look very different from the early charging stations deployed in India.

It could operate as a small distributed energy system combining:

grid connection + battery storage + renewable generation + charging hardware + energy-management software.

The infrastructure challenge is therefore gradually shifting from simply installing chargers to managing large amounts of electrical power efficiently.

Smaller CPOs Are Also Moving Toward Charging Hubs

Last week’s developments were not limited to the largest charging operators.

Relux Electric disclosed that it currently operates approximately 350 chargers and around 700-750 charging connectors, while planning to add another 1,000 connectors during FY27, primarily focused on DC fast charging.

The company is also planning approximately 25 charging hubs in Tamil Nadu, combining charging infrastructure with waiting facilities and other amenities.

This reflects another important change in charging strategy.

Early public charging infrastructure was often designed around individual chargers installed at malls, hotels, parking areas, petrol pumps or roadside locations.

The next phase may increasingly favour multi-charger energy hubs.

A charging hub offers several advantages.

Multiple chargers provide redundancy. High-power connections can be shared across several charging points. Dynamic load-management systems can allocate electricity depending on vehicle demand. Amenities can improve customer experience during charging sessions, while commercial facilities may generate additional revenue from vehicle dwell time.

For high-utilisation highway and commercial charging, this model is likely to become more important than isolated charging points.

India Is Entering Phase II of Charging Infrastructure

Taken together, the developments from the past week suggest that India’s charging market is beginning to cross an important threshold.

The first phase of the market was primarily about availability. The industry needed to build enough infrastructure to reduce charging anxiety and establish basic geographic coverage.

The second phase will be about infrastructure productivity.

The questions will increasingly become:

• How frequently is the charger used?
• How much electricity does it dispense?
• What is its uptime?
• Which vehicle category generates the demand?
• Can the local grid support the required load?
• What is the revenue generated per installed MW?
• How long does the infrastructure take to recover its capital cost?
• Can the site scale when EV traffic increases?

India still has a considerable deployment challenge.

Under PM E-DRIVE, 6,562 chargers had been approved by early August, while government disclosures indicated that none of these sanctioned chargers had yet been installed at that point. That shows how much infrastructure still has to move from approval into execution.

Nagpur demonstrates the difficulty of local implementation.

Bihar demonstrates the size of the next deployment pipeline.

Exicom demonstrates that charging hardware is preparing for higher power levels.

Huawei’s architecture demonstrates how energy storage may eventually help charging stations overcome grid constraints.

ChargeZone and Fresh Bus demonstrate how commercial fleets can create predictable, high-volume charging demand.

But the most important signal from the entire week remains the 72% increase in electricity consumed through public charging infrastructure.

That number indicates that India’s charging ecosystem is beginning to move beyond infrastructure creation into infrastructure utilisation.

And the fact that more than 74% of that electricity is already associated with heavy-duty charging suggests that buses, trucks and commercial fleets may become the economic centre of gravity for the next generation of charging infrastructure.

For India’s CPOs, charger manufacturers, DISCOMs, infrastructure funds and lenders, this requires a change in how the market is measured.

The winner of the next phase may not be the company operating the largest number of chargers.

It may be the company capable of building the highest-utilisation, highest-uptime and most energy-productive charging network.

India certainly needs more charging infrastructure.

But increasingly, the industry needs something more valuable than additional pins on a map.

It needs charging assets that are operational, heavily utilised and economically productive.

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