Airtel’s Green Drive with Nxtra, India’s Largest Network of Datacenters

Speaking at the 26th session of the Conference of the Parties (#COP26), Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi unveiled India’s five-point climate action agenda, which included achieving net zero emissions by 2070 and meeting half of the country’s energy requirements with renewable sources by 2030.

Climate change and sustainability is a big concern for organizations around the world. At #Airtel, we are committed to become a carbon neutral organization by 2050 with a focused approach towards climate change, energy efficiency and carbon emission reduction. We are determined to ensure that by 2030, 50% of our power inputs should come solely through renewable energy sources. With an aim to become more sustainable in our practices, we are working on green solutions that’ll promote low CO2 emissions and steer towards resource optimization strategies such as deploying lower power consuming base stations, reducing dependency on diesel, promoting green sites & active site sharing, recycling e-waste and converting indoor sites to outdoor (https://assets.airtel.in/static-assets/cms/Sustainability-Report-2018.pdf).?

As a group, Airtel has been working steadily to reduce its carbon footprint across its businesses. However, we faced two immediate concerns when it came to data centres - how to maintain renewable energy share in the energy mix and how to improve energy efficiency to reduce overall energy usage. With data consumption on the rise in India (it has increased by 17 times over the last 4 years), power consumption of data centres has also increased substantially, and we needed to bring about a structural change in the way we build and operate our data centres so that it becomes an energy efficient business.

Nxtra by Airtel, acknowledging this challenge, has made substantial investments in energy efficient initiatives, products and services to build green data centres that are powered by clean energy and follow sustainability practices in business operations. With India’s largest network of data centres (10 large and 120 edge data centres), Nxtra by Airtel has undertaken the transformation of the existing and the upcoming data centres into green data centres through various initiatives.

Our sustainable alliances include commissioning of a photovoltaic asset with an installed capacity of 28 MW for the data centres in Uttar Pradesh; sourcing electricity for our data centres in Delhi from a 9 MW hydro power plant and renewable energy (6.5 MW of wind and hydro) being sourced to power our data centres in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. In addition to these initiatives, over 28 rooftop solar PV plants have been set up at several data centre locations.

Nxtra by Airtel will continue to increase the use of green energy for its data centres, aiming to source 50% of its power requirements from renewable sources. In our existing as well as new data centres, we roped in partners to build interventions around conserving energy and to include waste efficient design features.??

Climate change mitigation, promoting low emission economy and adopting technologies and services that encourage energy conservation are critical issues for Airtel going forward and with the green energy powered data centres spread throughout the country, we hope to contribute substantially to the Prime Minister’s five-point national sustainable development agenda.??

https://www.airtel.in/press-release/04-2021/airtel-expands-green-energy-footprint ?