As we talk about data center energy efficiency, what is the state of affairs at India’s technology centers? Bangalore, considered the hotbed of India’s IT industry, is estimated to have the highest number of data centers but experts say that the evolution of energy efficiency standards and practices in India has not kept up with the rate of growth of its IT sector and the data centers that support it.

A key opportunity for initiating sustainable IT practices in India is improving the reliability of the
power-delivery grid. Utility power outages in India are so frequent that it is almost normal to see data centers running back-up generators nearly every day. To adapt to the intermittent nature of power supply from the public utility companies ( read, the electricity distribution companies), companies have redundant generator sets and over-provisioned UPS capacity, thus creating a back-up to the back-up which pushes up the cost of providing a kilowatt of power. And to top it all, frequent use of diesel generators also creates an environmental problem.

Again, given the shortage of water that plague Indian cities, many Indian data centers use air-cooled direct-exchange cooling systems, which also have a negative effect on energy efficiency.

But there is a silver lining to all of this. Since the cost of ensuring dependable power supply to the data center is so expensive, there is a larger economic incentive for increasing efficiency of the way it is used. The unreliable grid also provides an incentive for adoption of co-generation (on-site power generation) and reuse of waste heat produced during the co-generation process.

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