Green energy goals achievable with right steps taken now: Sunil Mittal

Mittal said the telecom sector as a whole was working to become carbon neutral by 2030, and at India's scale, even reaching 80% of that would be a huge achievement

If tech companies take steps in the right direction now, India can get close to its goal of having net zero emissions by 2070, and being carbon neutral by 2030, as announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, said Sunil Bharti Mittal at a virtual event on Friday.

"Most tech companies are currently guzzlers of energy and most of the power is currently on fossil fuel based providers. While that is fast changing, but that doesn't mean that we at our size should not start to accelerate our journey towards more greener power consumption," he said in conversation with Nandan Nilekani, the non-executive chairman at Infosys.

Mittal and Nilekani were conversing as part of a session on "Zero G to Zero C," a chat on how innovation and investment in Zero Gravity will accelerate the next phase of growth in Zero Carbon or green economy, at the InFinity Forum organised by International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) and Bloomberg.

Mittal said the telecom industry as a whole was working towards being carbon neutral by 2030, and at India's scale, even reaching 80 per cent of the commitment would be a huge achievement.

He said that India has nearly 250,000 quarter million telecom towers, and many of them are run on diesel generators. Solar solutions and long lasting batteries are being used to reduce the use of generators. The other part that can contribute to greener energy goals are data centers, which are massive power consuming entities.

India should look at how it can put these data centers nearer to solar parks so that we have massive solar power to provide electricity into these data centres is another way to make existing infrastructure provide greener and more sustainable energy, Mittal added.

Nilekani spoke about how Infosys began sustainability initiaves at Infosys campuses ten years ago, resulting in massive reduction in energy consumption. "We went carbon neutral in 2020, so I think we're one of the first companies in the world to go carbon neutral. I think one of the things is that in the transition to a zero carbon economy, information technology and telecommunications will play a huge role," he said.

He also added that because the bulk of physical infrastructure in India has not yet been built, there are likely to be fewer legacy challenges, and these can be built sustainably from the beginning.

"In some sense, countries that don't have a legacy of 30-40 years of technology can leapfrog. And I think the same principle can be applied in green (energy). And (though) it requires good strategic planning, but I think we can get there," Nilekani added.