India's data centre capacity may surge to 24-26 GW, impact on overall power demand to remain limited: CEA Chairman

India's data-centre capacity could surge to 24-26 GW from less than 2 GW currently, however, its share of overall electricity demand is likely to remain limited, said Central Electricity Authority (CEA) Chairperson Ghanshyam Prasad, adding, the country's renewable energy capacity is targeted to reach around 800 GW by 2035-36.

Speaking to on the sidelines of the 'Making the Indian Power Sector AI Enabled' event, Prasad said the expected growth in data-centre capacity has already been factored into the country's future power demand projections, with generation capacity being expanded accordingly.

"Right now the data center is hardly less than 2 gigawatt. Even if it goes to 24 to 26 what has been said today and maybe it might go slightly higher as well. Still, as a percentage of the overall demand it is not going to be much...even if it happens for example, we have already factored this in our future projections and we are planning our resources to be built accordingly," he said.


Highlighting the importance of maintaining sufficient power generation capacity, he said, "What we are only concentrating is we should not at any point of time run short of capacity in the country so that we are not able to meet the demands of the consumer."

On renewable energy expansion, Prasad said India's installed renewable energy capacity had reached 308 GW, crossing the 300 GW milestone. "We would definitely be reaching around 500 gigawatt by 2030...we have now also planned for 2035-36 wherein we are targeting to reach somewhere around around 800 gigawatt in that time frame."

Prasad also expressed optimism about the development of energy storage infrastructure, saying the sector was gaining momentum.

"Storage is not an issue. It's picking up and it will definitely come up very, very soon," he said.

Prasad further stressed the need to accelerate the adoption of smart meters to improve the visibility of electricity consumption and generation across the power network.

"Smart meter is taking off and it is the need of the hour because we need informations right from the consumer level till the generation level.So, since this information is required, we need meters which can communicate, and now because the rooftop is also coming in in a big way, so we need the visibility of these rooftops also to the load dispatchers," he added.