IT ministry in talks with Power min to address data centre energy needs

Ministry of Electronics and IT is in discussion with the power ministry to address issues related to energy requirement of data centres, a senior government official said on Saturday.

Speaking at Global Technology Summit, IT Secretary S Krishnan said that even before the development around artificial intelligence, there has been a lot of pressure to add data centres for cloud computing etc and at the same time there was was a lot of resistance to setting up more because they guzzle a lot of power and they don't provide much employment.

"I think if you have to take advantage of the technology, it (setting up of data centres) is something which needs to be done now. Which means we have to figure out ways of doing it. There are solutions, technological solutions which can be worked out. And my ministry is in consultation with the Ministry of Power and other ministries to try and address this issue," Krishnan said.

He said that India has an advantage in terms of having a lot of green power but green power necessarily is not very firm power.

"I think from where we had more data centres at locations along the coast where you have the submarine cables ending, you really need to move data centres to locations where power is available, particularly green power is available," Krishnan said.

He said that there is to figure out ways of storage of green power.

"It can't be a zero or one binary. That is, you're very green or you're not green at all. I think somewhere in between because, you see, one advantage with data centers and the use of power for this purpose is that I think they can afford to pay premium rates. So if there are slightly more expensive solutions, including possibly using to some extent, say, in certain cases gas because then gas is probably 60 per cent cleaner than coal," Krishnan said.

He said that an even bigger issue is also around the infrastructure of sub-stations to connect with data centres, which, along with a number of issues, need to get resolved.