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India's installed data centre capacity has grown from 520 MW in 2020 to about 1.5 GW in 2026, and is projected to reach 6.5 GW by 2030.
Electricity demand from data centres is projected to rise from about 13 TWh in 2024 to roughly 57 TWh by 2030, with the Ministry of Power estimating that generative AI workloads alone will add 26.3 GW of base-load demand by 2031-32.
A single 100 MW facility consumes about 2 million litres of water a day, roughly what 6,500 urban homes use; aggregate use is projected to rise from 150 billion litres in 2024-25 to 358 billion litres a year by 2030.
Facilities cluster in water-stressed, power-congested hubs, while grid evacuation bottlenecks forced the curtailment of 300 GWh of renewable electricity in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
Analysts have called for an enforceable national sustainability framework, mandatory disclosure of water and power metrics, and a star-rating regime based on Power Usage Effectiveness and Water Usage Effectiveness.
Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is the ratio of the total energy drawn by a data centre facility to the energy actually used by its computing equipment. A PUE of 1.0 would mean every unit of electricity went to computation and none to cooling, lighting or losses; real facilities sit above that, and the gap is mostly cooling. Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) is the companion metric, expressing litres of water consumed per unit of IT energy. The two together are what a star-rating regime would grade, because they turn an opaque industrial facility into a comparable number - the same logic by which appliances carry BEE star labels.
Simple Analogy: PUE is a data centre's mileage figure. A car that burns half its fuel running the air conditioner has poor mileage no matter how good the engine is.
Data centre exhaust adds a new industrial contributor to a phenomenon usually attributed to concrete, asphalt and vehicles.
Curtailment is the deliberate reduction of renewable output when the grid cannot absorb it - a transmission problem, not a generation problem.
The Central Ground Water Board classifies assessment units as safe, semi-critical, critical or over-exploited depending on the ratio of extraction to annual recharge.
States compete for data centre capital by granting essential-service status and easing conditions, which can dilute environmental mandates.
GS Paper 3 > Environment and Infrastructure > Energy, conservation and environmental impact assessment
General Awareness > Environment and Current Affairs
General Awareness > Environment
In India, it is legally mandatory for which of the following to report on cyber security incidents? 1. Service providers 2. Data centres 3. Body corporate Select the correct answer using the code given below:
Answer: 1, 2 and 3
Total facility energy divided by the energy used by IT equipment; the lower and closer to 1, the more efficient the data centre.
Litres of water consumed per unit of IT energy used by a data centre.
Deliberate reduction of available renewable generation because the grid cannot evacuate or absorb it.
The minimum continuous level of electricity demand that must be met round the clock, which intermittent renewables alone cannot serve without storage.
An assessment unit where annual groundwater extraction exceeds 100 per cent of annual recharge.