Policy on Solar-Powered Data Centers

The government is working on a policy for establishing data centers across the country under which, a major push is likely to be given to renewable energy sources such as solar power, since data centers consume a lot of power. Data centers do not have a cross-subsidy to help them tide over high electricity costs and they consume a lot of power. Other than the data consumed by data trays or data racks, the government wants to push for renewable energy consumption for other needs of the building in which the data centre is housed. Moreover, it is likely that the ministry will urge state governments to give cross-subsidy to data centres. Currently, data centres get electricity at either very high rates or get lower electricity from other states but have to pay a cross-subsidy surcharge. Once the power cost is managed, more players can be attracted into the system and the overall cost of running or managing a data centre comes down dramatically. Under the new nationwide policy, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is also likely to allow states to either follow the policy in total or mould it slightly according to their needs.  Apart from these changes, the MeitY may also suggest that data centres be considered a part of urban or semi-urban infrastructure in order to attract players from real estate to make investments in the sector.