Maharashtra’s Kakodkar panel to study data centres’ pull on water and power

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The news

MUMBAI, 12 October. Maharashtra has set up a 17-member committee under Dr Anil Kakodkar, former Atomic Energy Commission chairman, to study how data centres affect water, power, air quality, noise, heat emissions and local communities. A government resolution of the Industries, Investment, Services and Mining Department gives it three months to report, recommend guidelines on water reuse and alternative cooling, and draft a standard operating procedure for projects. Members include CSIR-NEERI’s director and executives of Yotta and Amazon Web Services. The bigger water draw may be off site: per Bloomberg, reported in ET, about 96% of the 21 billion gallons Meta consumed in 2024 was indirect — water used at power plants generating its electricity — and only 4% was direct, mostly cooling at its data centres.

Prelims nuggets

Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is total facility energy divided by the energy used by IT equipment; 1.0 is the ideal.
Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) is annual site water use in litres divided by IT equipment energy in kWh; it counts direct water only, not water used at the power plant.
The IndiaAI Mission, approved by the Union Cabinet in March 2024 with an outlay of ₹10,371.92 crore, makes subsidised GPU compute one of its pillars.