For most of the history of electricity supply, demand appeared where people and industry already were, and the network followed. However, data centres invert, and they can be built almost anywhere with land, water, fibre and power. Further, data centres alone would account for close to a tenth of everything the country draws at its busiest hour today, notes Brajesh Kumar.
Set beside that, data centres alone would account for close to a tenth of everything the country draws at its busiest hour today. Such a scale is worth noting.
Almost every distribution network carries a rhythm. Homes draw heavily in the evening and taper off at night. Offices and shops follow the working day. Agricultural load moves with the season. Planning has always leaned on that variation, because no single entity reaches its maximum consumption at the same moment.
However, a data centre does not behave that way. It runs at a steady draw through the day and through the night. A single large facility can ask for as much power as a small city, at one location, and it will expect that supply to hold to a standard set by global precedent than the local norms.
Three consequences follow: first, the load remains flat, leaving little opportunity to schedule maintenance or absorb disruptions. Second, it is concentrated, with large volumes of demand converging at a limited number of network nodes. Third, it is exceptionally sensitive to outages, where even momentary interruptions can have significant consequences.
This problem is not peculiar to India. The International Energy Agency estimates that data centres consumed about 415 TWh worldwide in 2024, close to 1.5 per cent of global use, and projects this will roughly double to around 945 TWh by 2030, growing four times faster than demand from everything else.
Across Asia Pacific, more than 32 GW of capacity is planned across over 1,150 projects, and securing power has become harder for developers than securing land, financing or permits.
That last point deserves attention. If dependable power is constrained around digital infrastructure, the readiness of the electricity ecosystem no longer remains a technical matter rather becomes a question of competitiveness. KPMG estimates that the end-to-end data centre value chain in India represents an opportunity of about $90 billion by FY35.
A large share of that investment will settle wherever power is reliable, and the connection process is predictable. These dynamics change what the power sector is being asked to solve.
Part of the problem is a mismatch in vocabulary. Indian distribution measures its performance in hours and minutes, through indices counting how long supply was interrupted and how often. A data centre measures failure in milliseconds. Between those two scales lies a gap that no amount of additional capacity closes on its own.
It also changes what planning has to produce. Utilities have become good at estimating how much electricity will be needed. However, data centres depend on the planned IT load, the cooling configuration, the backup arrangement.
For most of the history of electricity supply, demand appeared where people and industry already were, and the network followed. Data centres invert that. They can be built almost anywhere with land, water, fibre and power. Additionally, every large data centre arrives with its own uninterruptible supply, battery banks and backup generation, sized for unprecedented challenges. With the surge of electric vehicles, and integration of variable renewables such high level of power management is challenging.
However, India has one advantage. Unlike several markets where the data centre boom outpaced grid planning, forcing utilities to retrofit infrastructure under pressure, India has begun mapping demand before it fully materialises. That window is narrow, but it is valuable.
The question, therefore, is no longer whether India will have enough electricity. It is whether the grid can deliver the right quality of power, in the right place, every second of every day, for a new generation of industries that cannot afford even a blink.
About the author: Brajesh Kumar is Chief Executive Officer, Chandigarh Power Distribution Ltd