Delta $500 mn investment to accelerate India’s transition to sustainable energy, creating jobs and reducing carbon emissions 

The company’s substantial investment bolsters energy efficiency, renewable solutions, and global manufacturing, aligning with India’s strategic vision.

Delta Electronics manages a diverse network covering core to remote sites, offering power solutions from a few kW to several hundred kW. They maintain 500,000 vital telecom sites, dominate with a 70 percent core network power share, and invest in EV charging infrastructure, aiming for 10,000 units by year-end to match India’s growing EV market. Rajesh Kaushal shares industry insights in EPR Magazine.   

How can Delta leverage expertise to revolutionise India’s energy sector amid its massive workforce, significant investments, and focus on energy efficiency?

Delta has maintained its position as the world’s leading company in power electronics since 2003, leveraging its extensive experience to expand into energy management solutions. Our diverse product lines encompass renewable energy solutions, with a focus on solar and wind power converters, solar inverters, telecom power solutions, and electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure. These offerings cater to various applications, contributing to enhanced energy efficiency and a reduced carbon footprint, aligning with global environmental goals.

In India, we play a pivotal role by offering high-efficiency AC power solutions for data centers, including UPS systems, lithium and battery backups, and energy-efficient software solutions. India’s large workforce and other macroeconomic advantages make it an attractive destination for global investors, seeking alternative manufacturing hubs outside China. We will be investing $500 million in India to capitalise on these strengths, establishing seven plants in Krishnagiri. Two plants are already operational, while the remaining four to five will be ready within the next few quarters. These facilities will serve both the domestic and export markets, primarily in the Americas, Europe, and Southeast Asia, further solidifying our commitment to energy management and manufacturing in India.

In an era of audacious innovation, how can Delta reinvent itself to leverage the colossal workforce and drive an electrifying surge toward sustainability?

We are aggressively expanding its investment in India, focusing not only on manufacturing but also establishing a substantial Research and Development (R&D) center. The company plans to hire around 2,000 engineers over the next three to four years, making the R&D center the hub of excellence for their global business units. Following corporate policy, approximately 7 percent of revenue will be allocated to R&D, a practice to be mirrored in India. The R&D team’s primary mission is to create solutions for the Indian market and for global clients.

On the manufacturing front, we are gearing up to establish a significant production base in India. Their ambitious target is to achieve production levels ranging from $1.5 billion to $2 billion over the next few years, with a primary focus on exporting products globally.

This substantial expansion naturally demands a large workforce, as Delta aims to serve its global customers from these Indian manufacturing facilities. Simultaneously, we are committed to sustainability through ESG initiative. By 2030, we aim to be ‘RE 100,’ meaning that all our operations and energy consumption will rely entirely on renewable energy sources. Investments have already begun to achieve this goal, with a focus on reaching carbon neutrality in energy consumption by 2030.

Moreover, Delta’s management prioritises developing solutions for power conversion and energy management, with an emphasis on enhancing energy efficiency and reducing customer capital expenditures. This approach aligns with the broader commitment to sustainability, ensuring our operations in India and globally lead the way in innovation and environmental responsibility.

Can you unveil Delta’s strategy for ensuring uninterrupted operations and maximum uptime in critical data center environments?

As a prominent player in India and the global data center industry, our company boasts a substantial market share of around 300 MW capacity for data center, IT, and enterprise applications. The data center sector demands top-tier energy efficiency and exceptional uptime, and our strategic approach focuses on redundancy and modular innovation to deliver outstanding solutions.

Our modular hot-swap technology is a leading innovation, ensuring high uptime and enabling customers to design flexible and reliable data center architectures. These solutions incorporate robust controller architectures, guaranteeing seamless fallback options in the event of disruptions, maintaining uninterrupted power supply to customer equipment. Our high-efficiency solutions are characterised by remarkable power density, with UPS and lithium batteries that are both space-saving and energy-efficient, offering a competitive advantage by minimising footprint in UPS solutions.

We have also entered the realm of prefabricated data center solutions, designed, configured, and pretested in-house. These solutions are engineered for reliability and scalability, providing peace of mind for customers deploying data centers, whether for core locations or hyper-scale environments. Additionally, we offer specialised solutions for emerging edge data center applications, capitalising on the advent of 5G in the telecom sector. These modular solutions, situated at the network edge, reduce network latency, enhancing overall network performance.

We extend these solutions to telecom, data center colocation, hyper-scale, and emerging enterprise customers, adapting to the evolving needs of the market. Our commitment to innovation, efficiency, and reliability places us at the forefront of the data center industry, both in India and on a global scale.

Data security and compliance are paramount. What innovative approaches and technologies is Delta Electronics employing to address these challenges in data centers?

In the data center space we have a system which is called data center infrastructure management software which is actually a platform called DCIMSL, and this solution we provide to our data center customers. It provides safety and security tools so that our customers can secure their data and maintain their business continuity. This is one of the innovative offerings from the data center application, besides that, we are also deploying and undertaking the compliances to VAPT which is vulnerability assessment and penetration testing and this is being offered on data remote monitoring solutions. Through this, we can take care of customer cyber security and also ensure that data security and compliance are met. These are two major areas that we are attempting in our business environment.

How is Delta navigating the integration of Data center solutions to meet the demands of hybrid and multi-cloud architectures?

This is an emerging application and in this area, we have developed smart, intelligent, integrated, and self-contained data center solutions which we call I-Cool HDC solutions offered in various capacities ranging from few kilowatts to few 100 kilowatts. It can suit various customer needs as per their cloud architecture. Various customers like enterprises or airports, retail, education institutions, hospitals, and various industries are adopting these cloud technologies.

We are offering these solutions in various capacities and that can be extended from a single-rack solution to a multiple-rack solution. A variety of applications in a variety of customer segments can be attended by these solutions that we have developed as I Cool Edge DC solutions. These solutions are helping to meet the demand of our customers who are adopting cloud technologies.

Spokesperson: Rajesh Kaushal, VP- Delta Electronics India