NEW DELHI, October 3 — The lithium-ion battery, first demonstrated in prototype by John Goodenough, Rachid Yazami, and Akira Yoshino in the 1980s, became commercially viable when Sony and Asahi Kasei released the first commercial unit in 1991, marking a foundational shift in energy storage technology with direct implications for India’s growing electronics and electric vehicle sectors.
According to officials, the ministry said the 1991 Sony-Asahi Kasei battery delivered approximately 80 watt-hours per kilogram, nearly double the energy density of nickel-cadmium batteries then in use, a performance leap that enabled lighter, longer-lasting devices critical for India’s mobile phone and laptop adoption surge in the early 2000s.
By 2000, lithium-ion batteries powered over 80% of portable electronics, including laptops and mobile phones, due to their lightweight, high energy density, and lack of memory effect, a trend mirrored in India’s rapidly expanding consumer tech market as domestic manufacturing and imports scaled.
The technology expanded into electric vehicles starting with the 2008 Tesla Roadster, which used 6,831 lithium-ion cells to achieve a 244-mile range on a single charge, marking a turning point in automotive energy storage and foreshadowing India’s own EV push under the Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Hybrid and Electric Vehicles (FAME) scheme.By 2015, global lithium-ion battery production reached approximately 20 gigawatt-hours annually, driven by consumer electronics and early EV adoption, with China accounting for over 70% of manufacturing capacity by 2021, a dominance that has shaped supply chain dependencies for Indian battery assemblers and cell importers.
In 2021, global lithium-ion battery production surpassed 500 gigawatt-hours, with China accounting for over 70% of manufacturing capacity, reinforcing Asia’s central role in the battery value chain even as India seeks to expand domestic cell production through the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme for Advanced Chemistry Cells. The 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to John B. Goodenough, M.
Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino for their contributions to lithium-ion battery development, recognizing the cumulative breakthroughs — from Whittingham’s 1970s work at Exxon using titanium disulfide as cathode and lithium metal as anode, to Goodenough’s 1980 lithium cobalt oxide cathode doubling voltage potential, to Yazami’s 1980 graphite anode discovery and Yoshino’s 1985 practical battery using petroleum coke anode — that made modern rechargeable batteries possible.
By 2020, lithium-ion battery costs had fallen to approximately $137 per kilowatt-hour from over $1,200 per kilowatt-hour in 2010, according to BloombergNEF, enabling mass-market electric vehicles and improving the economics of grid-scale storage projects like the Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia (100 MW/129 MWh, operational 2017), which demonstrated lithium-ion’s role in stabilizing renewable energy grids.
Ongoing research focuses on increasing energy density beyond 300 watt-hours per kilogram, reducing reliance on cobalt, and improving recycling rates, which currently recover less than 5% of lithium-ion batteries globally, a challenge India faces as it scales EV adoption and seeks to build a circular battery economy.
The enduring legacy of the lithium-ion battery lies in its transformation of portable electronics, acceleration of electric transportation, and enabling of renewable energy integration — all rooted in decades of incremental materials science advances, with India positioning itself to benefit from and contribute to the next phase of this evolution.
