NTT India to set up 120 MW Captive Wind Energy Plant in Maharashtra

NTT India plans to augment its captive renewable energy power plant in Maharashtra, in an effort to meet its data centre power requirements.

Talking to W.Media, Sharad Sanghi, CEO, NTT Ltd. in India said: “NTT has already set up a 62.5 MW plant in Maharashtra, and we are augmenting that with a 120 MW captive wind plant in the state. We have signed the term sheet and will be announcing it soon. Our intention, as stated by the company is to be achieve Net Zero targets by 2030,” added Sanghi.

The company has a 20 MW hybrid wind solar plant in Karnataka. India is ahead of other countries when it comes to renewable energy as the government has spelt out incentives for companies setting up power plants and companies are looking to avail of the benefits provided by the government.

This is a part of NTT India’s plans to invest USD 2 billion to expand data centres, networks and solar power projects in India. In September 2020, NTT Ltd.’s Global Data Centres division announced the expansion of its facilities with the launch of a new high-density and hyperscale data center in Mumbai, the financial capital of India. The Mumbai 7 Data Center operates with 375,000 sq.ft of colocation space, and will offer the capacity to host 5000 racks and over 30 MW of load. The new Mumbai 7 Data Center facility will expand NTT’s data center capacity (server room) in India by 30 per cent.

Improving efficiencies

One of the key areas that NTT is looking at going forward is to improve efficiencies. NTT coming out with a new deisgn which would incporporate liquid immersion cooling technologies, early next year for which trials have been done. “The implementation phase is on and this would PUE would be up a significant notch as liquid immersion cooling has proven itself,” said Sanghi.

When it comes to physical buildings, NTT is looking at what it can do to be more ‘green’. “We are looking at LEED Certifications for newer buildings, similar to our Bengaluru data centre,” stated Sanghi. This also mandates that property developers need to abide by certification standards, which has implications on constuction costs going up. Capex goes up in the short term but in the longer run opex is more efficient with this, pointed out Sanghi.

Further, NTT and Tokyo Century Corporation (Tokyo Century) will collaborate in India’s data centre businesses, which was announced recently. Tokyo Century will be the first joint investor in NTT’s data centre business. Through this approach, NTT is looking to amplify its full-stack services for the data centre.

GDC HC established BOM 8 to hold assets related to the data centre business in Mumbai, India through an SPV newly established in Singapore in 2020. This SPV is developing a 9-story data centre with a total building area of over 310,000 square feet (approximately 29,000 square meters) and critical IT load of 24 megawatt (MW).

The demand is coming from a slew of enterprises in india which are in the process of Digitalisation of their business processes. For example, the company sees lot of demand coming from OTT providers in India. This, coupled with trends such as Remote Work is expected to drive up demand. The US$2 billion investment is in line with this and also includes MIST undersea or submarine cable, with landing points in Chennai and Mumbai, to support the burgeoning demand.

India is growing at 23 per cent CAGR (2017-2022) due to increased demand from global cloud providers and a proposed data sovereignty law by the Indian government.