Report on Circularity in Cleantech

For two decades the clean energy transition was understood as a problem of generation. It has succeeded by that measure and global energy investment reached USD 3.3 trillion in 2025, of which clean energy accounted for USD 2.2 trillion. But the binding constraint has now shifted to solar modules, batteries and turbines. These are first and foremost, manufactured objects, assembled from refined metals and high-purity materials drawn from concentrated supply chains. The transition is now the fastest-growing manufacturing and materials story in the global economy, and its central vulnerabilities are industrial. A key vulnerability is the concentration and volatility of the minerals that are processed only in a handful of countries. Lithium prices, having surged eightfold in 2021–22, have since fallen by more than 80%.

Additionally, every panel, turbine and battery deployed today is a future end-of-life object, and the global circularity rate has fallen from 9.1% in 2018 to 6.9% in 2025. Recycled volumes are rising, but virgin extraction is rising faster. India occupies a unique position in this picture. It is simultaneously one of the world’s fastest-growing clean energy markets and an aspiring manufacturing power making foundational industrial choices in real time. Where established industrial economies must retrofit circularity into systems whose designs and supply relationships are already locked in, much of India’s clean-tech manufacturing base is still under construction. India therefore retains a design-stage window, the highest-leverage point in the entire circular hierarchy, that others have largely forfeited.To locate where that leverage sits, the report adapts Michael Porter’s value chain framework to sector scale, decomposing solar PV, wind and batteries into discrete stages and mapping India’s position at each. The diagnosis is consistent across all three.

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