India is the third largest market for Schneider Electric

India is the third-largest market for Schneider Electric from sales, revenue, and contribution standpoint. “It’s becoming so big, so strategic – not only the size, but also the growth,” according to Bin Lu, Executive Vice President – Power Products Division, Schneider Electric.

Mr. Lu, who spoke to The Hindu at the Schneider’s Innovation Summit 2026, held in New Delhi recently, on the theme “Advancing Energy Tech to Power a Digital and Sustainable India,” said the company has invested a lot of resources in local research and development. “At least a couple of years ago, we were talking about almost 6,000 research and development engineers,” he said.

India is one of the largest R and D hubs globally for Schneider. The global digital distribution business has four global or regional hubs, including India. “Our biggest R and D hub globally is in Bengaluru in terms of the number of people,” he said.

With the war in West Asia that just ended, at least in India and the East Asian region, people are going to look more at renewables as a long-term strategy. “It means we will move away from the regular energy systems into newer systems.”

In the last 20 years, the energy landscape in India has seen huge growth in solar and wind. India is the third-largest country in terms of installed solar capacity and the fourth-largest in terms of installed wind capacity.

With the construction of more data centres, especially AI data centres, energy consumption is going up exponentially. At the same time, the power grid is getting congested. So, there’s a huge pipeline of projects, especially renewables, waiting to be connected to the power system.

In the next five years, this entire data centre cumulative installed base will double globally. There are a lot of discussions about onsite power generation to reduce pressure on the grid.

While most of these new data centre developments are happening in the U.S. and China, among the rest of the world, India is one of the biggest countries in terms of new builds. It is one of the fastest-growing countries, as a lot of companies are investing in data centres.

Three or four years ago, all the data centres in the world combined used about 1% of electricity. Now, it is almost 3%. and it is expected to be more than 5% by 2030.

As new data centres are being built, their energy demand will increase. There should be more energy sources to meet this growing demand. There is also a need for energy storage in the power ecosystem. Schneider has introduced technologies and solutions that will help the data centre industry scale sustainably, he said.

(The correspondent visited the Innovation Summit at the invitation of Schneider Electric).