The global green transition is often seen as a competition to deploy more solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries and wind turbines. But behind these visible changes in energy and transportation, a different race is underway: the race to develop the technologies that will support a low-carbon economy.
A new report by the World Intellectual Property Organization sheds light on this competition. Its Green Technology Inventory, which covers five sectors and 36 technology fields, uses patent families to map the evolution of green technological innovation. Green-technology patent families worldwide nearly quadrupled from about 111,400 in 2003 to 412,300 in 2023. Over the same period, green technologies' share of global patent filings grew from 13.7 percent to 18.2 percent.
For India, the more consequential question is where this expanding pool of green innovation is being generated. The global distribution of technological capabilities will shape which countries capture the economic opportunities created by the green transition, and which remain primarily markets for technologies developed elsewhere.
China’s Rise Is Reshaping Green Innovation
The global expansion of green innovation has been uneven. In 2003, Japan accounted for 45 percent of global green patent families, while China's share was only 7.8 percent. By 2023, the positions had almost completely reversed. China accounted for 71.9 percent of global green patent families, compared with 6.9 percent for Japan. South Korea accounted for 8.3 percent and the United States 4.3 percent. No individual European country accounted for even 3 percent.
WIPO estimates that China contributed about 95.7 percent of the net growth in global green patent families between 2003 and 2023, with green patenting growing at an average annual rate of 19.3 percent. Some of this reflects China's broader rise in global patenting – its share of total patent applications also increased sharply over the same period – but the concentration in green technologies remains striking.
The geographical centre of green technological innovation has shifted dramatically. The green transition is increasingly an industrial and technological contest.
Green Innovation Is Moving Beyond Clean-Energy Generation
The geographical concentration of green innovation is only part of the story. Its technological composition is changing as well. The question is increasingly how to store, distribute, manage and use clean energy efficiently.
Between 2003–05 and 2021–23, the share of green patenting devoted to clean-energy technologies fell from 26 percent to 19.4 percent. Over the same period, the share of energy efficiency, conversion and storage rose from 36.2 percent to 42.2 percent.
Smart energy, grids and transmission accounted for 15.5 percent of green patent families in 2021–23, up from 6.2 percent in 2003–05. Battery energy storage accounted for another 13.8 percent. Together, these two fields represented almost three in every ten green patent families. Adding air-pollution control, the three fields accounted for 41.8 percent of global green patenting.
For India, this shift broadens the technological opportunities associated with the energy transition. The next phase will require batteries, storage technologies, smart grids, transmission systems, power electronics and intelligent energy-management systems alongside renewable-generation capacity.
India’s Green Technology Opportunity Lies in Specialisation
Electric-vehicle charging illustrates how swiftly new technological opportunities can arise. WIPO recorded only two patent families related to EV charging infrastructure between 2003 and 2005. By 2021–23, that number had grown to 16,362. Technologies barely visible in the patent landscape two decades ago can quickly become major fields of innovation as research, markets, infrastructure and policy evolve.
For India, this raises a different question: where does it already have capabilities that could support globally competitive green technologies?
Although India is not a top global holder of green patents by volume, WIPO's measure of relative technological specialisation points to notable strength in two areas. In electric vehicles, India records a high positive specialisation score, below Sweden, Germany and France but above Italy. In biopesticides and biocontrol, its relative specialisation is even stronger, behind only Brazil and Israel among the countries compared. The measure captures how strongly a country specialises in a particular technology relative to its overall patenting activity; it does not measure absolute patent volume.
This suggests that India's green innovation advantage may lie in building depth in selected areas rather than trying to replicate China's breadth and scale. A more targeted approach would focus on fields where India combines existing scientific or industrial capabilities with a substantial domestic market and potential for technological learning and exports. Electric mobility is one example. Biopesticides and biocontrol offer another.
The same assessment should be extended to fields such as low-carbon agriculture, affordable energy storage, green hydrogen, low-carbon materials and climate-resilient technologies. The relevant question is where India already possesses research depth, industrial capabilities, domestic demand and realistic pathways to scale. Limited R&D resources can then be concentrated in fields where India has the potential to build substantial expertise and globally competitive solutions.
From Green Innovation to Industrial Capability
Patent statistics measure inventive activity; they do not necessarily reflect successful innovation or the manufacturing capabilities needed to commercialise it. For India, innovation policy must therefore connect research and intellectual property with production and markets.
Governments need to ask which technologies they want domestic firms to master. That means linking public R&D funding with industrial strategy, universities with companies, and intellectual property with manufacturing.
India already has many of the necessary ingredients: a large domestic market, a substantial scientific and engineering base, entrepreneurial firms and an expanding clean-energy industry. The challenge is to organise these assets around clearly defined technological priorities and build depth from research through manufacturing and exports.
China's experience demonstrates the power of scale. But WIPO's specialisation data point to another route: countries do not have to dominate every green technology to build meaningful technological capabilities. For India, the task is to identify fields in which domestic demand, scientific capability and industrial capacity can reinforce one another.
The green transition will create a large domestic market for these technologies. Its longer-term economic value will depend on whether that market also becomes a source of technological learning and industrial capability.
The next phase of India’s green transition will therefore be judged by how effectively it turns that market into a foundation for globally competitive technologies.