"We don't want to get into that," Jitin Prasada, India's junior minister for electronics and IT, said on 14 October of countries where data centres take power and consumers end up paying more1. Speaking at an event of the Central Electricity Authority (CEA), the national power-planning body, he said a dedicated data-centre policy is coming. He gave no scope and no date.
The authority had set up a committee, reported on 1 October, on the operational, policy and regulatory issues large data centres raise, including grid stability and cyber risk to the power sector2. It expects data-centre demand to reach about 17 GW by 2031-32 (the financial year to March 2032). Installed data-centre capacity is 1,575 MW, a figure the government gave in August, up from 375 MW in 2020.
The planner's 17 GW is about eleven times that installed figure, six years out, though the two may be counted differently: one is projected demand, the other installed capacity. Gujarat alone targets 7.5 GW under the subsidised state policy it formally published in August, which runs to 2029. That one state's target is 44% of the national projection for 2031-32.
Residents near Amazon's site at Thane, outside Mumbai, have protested over power, water and noise, and campaigners in Visakhapatnam accuse Google's $15bn project of harming wildlife and misusing temple land, Reuters reported3. Both companies deny wrongdoing. Those are the households Prasada's policy promises to protect.
