A cartography of the clean industrial base.
From a copper seam in the Atacama to a polysilicon kiln in Inner Mongolia, every clean technology rests on a stack of materials, machines and capabilities. NZIPL maps that stack — country by country, product by product, year by year — so policymakers, industry and the public can see who makes what, and where the leverage lies.
India is building solar panels faster than anyone — but on borrowed silicon, glass and copper.
Modules assembled in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat now cover roofs from Texas to Saudi Arabia. The cell, the wafer, the polysilicon and the copper feeding them, however, are imported almost entirely — overwhelmingly through a single supplier. India's exporting downstream while its upstream deepens. This is what energy autonomy looks like, halfway built.
A net importer, by a factor of five.
Across the solar value chain, India bought $56.1B of inputs in 2024 and sold $11.3B abroad. That gap is concentrated in two places: copper ore and module-production equipment.
The map of solar dependency doesn't look like solar.
Indonesia, Chile and China feed the kilns. Modules flow back to America, the Gulf and Russia. The shape of a solar supply chain is the shape of a copper, alumina and float-glass supply chain — with one outlier dominating cells.
India climbs from the top — modules first, then cells.
Read the chain left to right: copper ore, polysilicon, wafers, cells, modules. India runs a surplus only at module scale; every step before it bleeds dollars. The capability is real, but it's tethered to upstream imports.
Twenty-two years of compounding imports.
The deficit didn't widen suddenly. From 2003 onward, every solar phase has scaled — but raw materials and processed materials scaled fastest. The post-2017 inflection in module exports is real. So is the post-2020 surge in inputs needed to make them.
India is good at solar, but not at making solar.
The capability score combines export specialisation, scale and complexity. India is solidly mid-pack — ahead of every European peer except Germany, but a full order of magnitude behind China and the Vietnam–Malaysia–Thailand assembly belt.
Each circle is one economy. Position on the x-axis is export scale; the y-axis is capability (a composite of RCA, complexity and growth). India sits in the upper-middle band, rising fast.
A balanced producer concentrates near the centre. India's profile leans hard toward the downstream — components and equipment — and away from raw materials and final assembly.
Adjacent stories & angles.
Three threads pulled from this story — a comparison, a capability deep-dive, and a counterfactual. Or compose your own from the data.
Every country, technology & product in the green dictionary.
2,431 HS-6 products tagged across 12 clean technologies, 196 economies, 22 years. Filter, rank, and pin combinations to compose a story.
last refresh · 27 Apr 2026 · 04:12 UTC
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Draft a story in three questions.
Pick a country, a technology and an angle. The atlas pulls the data, drafts the narrative and lays out the charts. You annotate, edit and share.
Atlas drafts a story from any of the 40 country–technology pairs in the current catalog. Five render with full editorial prose; the rest preview structurally and gain depth as CVCE wires more data.