Ammonia cooling the infrastructure behind India's Viksit Bharat dream

This article is authored by Shriram Subramanian, founder and managing director, InGovern Research Services.

India aims to be a top-three global economy, driven by its vision of Atmanirbhar Bharat and Viksit Bharat. This is a country racing to build the physical backbone of a digital, industrial, energy-secure future. But here's the uncomfortable question: is the ecosystem actually ready?

Viksit Bharat (Representative Image)

Gujarat alone has unveiled a data centre policy chasing nearly ₹6 lakh crore in investment. Nationally, India's data centre capacity could expand from around 1.5 GW today to 9-12 GW by 2031, creating a $100 billion investment opportunity, according to Deloitte. On the energy side, India isn't just adding solar and wind; it has also revived its dream of 100 GW of nuclear power by 2047, an elevenfold jump from where it stands today, backed by a new law that for the first time allows private companies to build and own nuclear plants. And e-commerce and quick commerce have already done what railways once did, revolutionising retail consumption and pushing demand into the smallest towns and villages using warehouses and micro-fulfilment centres that didn't exist a decade ago.

Every data centre needs to be cooled, or it melts down. Every cold chain needs refrigeration; the food, vaccines, and medicines don't survive the last mile. Every warehouse racing to serve tier-3 and tier-4 India needs temperature control that doesn't exist yet in most of those towns. Nuclear plants, manufacturing factories, and chemical plants, all depend on cooling and refrigeration systems working flawlessly, continuously, and safely.

And yet refrigerant and cooling technology is treated like plumbing - invisible until it fails. But it needs to change. Because of climate change, India's own decarbonisation commitments, and the sheer cost of running all this new infrastructure, the choice of refrigerant is about to become one of the most consequential and most urgent decisions Indian industry makes this decade. Refrigerant technology has evolved through several generations, the most recent of which has been the shift from legacy chemicals to advanced, low-global warming potential (GWP) solutions that balance cooling performance with environmental responsibility.

A major catalyst for this transition is the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, under which India committed to freeze hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) consumption from 2028 and achieve an 85% phase-down by 2047. Among the alternatives available, ammonia is the most compelling option. Ammonia has been used as an industrial refrigerant for decades. Synthetic refrigerants still struggle to match its zero-ozone depletion potential (ODP), zero GWP, exceptional thermodynamic efficiency and cost advantages. This makes ammonia the natural refrigerant of choice for India's future.

Ammonia-based systems are typically 3–10% more energy efficient than conventional alternatives and, in suitable plant configurations, can reduce installation costs by 10% –20%, resulting in significantly lower lifecycle costs, as per experts. There have been concerns over safety, however the industry has moved from reacting to leaks to preventing them through low-charge system designs and secondary-loop and hybrid architectures that confine ammonia to central plant rooms. The reality is that all refrigerants - whether natural or synthetic, have inherent safety considerations, including flammability or toxicity. Modern cooling systems are therefore engineered with multiple layers of safety, making refrigerant leaks extremely rare. This is further supported by hi-tech systems such as IoT-enabled monitoring, real-time gas detection, automated shutdown systems, and predictive maintenance, making ammonia systems viable for a far broader range of industrial and comfort-cooling applications than a decade ago.

These advancements come at a time when India's industrial refrigeration market is poised for sustained growth given its ambition of becoming Viksit Bharat by 2047. Much of this demand is being driven by food processing, cold storage, dairy, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and refrigerated logistics. Today, nearly 90% of ammonia consumption in India is concentrated in these industrial applications, placing the country broadly in line with mature global markets.

Official government data reports say that residential and commercial buildings consume more than 30% of India’s energy needs. The largest consumer of power in these buildings is HVAC related cooling, which can consume 30%+ of the total power requirement. Hence, by changing the refrigerants that we use, we can drastically cut the entire power requirement that the nation requires, creating space and surplus for the economy to rapidly grow, while at the same time becoming a greener.

However, India's adoption of ammonia in adjacent applications, such as commercial HVAC and distributed cooling systems, remains relatively limited, even as several international markets have successfully deployed low-charge ammonia and hybrid natural refrigerant technologies. The barriers to wider adoption are no longer technological. Instead, they stem from ecosystem readiness such as risk perception, capital allocation decisions, availability of skilled operators and familiarity among consultants and regulators. An encouraging aspect is that these challenges are being steadily addressed through stronger safety standards, modern low-charge-system designs, automation, and growing industry expertise. As these capabilities continue to be widely adopted, the barriers will diminish significantly.

To close this gap faster, policy support will be super critical, which will create a supportive ecosystem to enable ammonia-based HVAC systems in commercial, residential and public infrastructure. This can be implemented through national standards, model specifications and streamlined approval mechanisms. International experience demonstrates the technology's maturity, with airports such as Oslo, Heathrow, Changi, Zurich, Copenhagen and Düsseldorf who have been successfully operating ammonia-based air-conditioning systems for years.

Technology alone will not be able to drive this transition, it will require incentives like capital subsidies, accelerated depreciation, concessional financing and viability-gap funding to encourage adoption in HVAC applications. Equally important will be investments in training, certification, demonstration projects and operator education across major industrial clusters to strengthen confidence among buyers, consultants, contractors and regulators. Together, this will enable ammonia to play a major role in building a stronger and more competitive refrigeration future for India.

This article is authored by Shriram Subramanian, founder and managing director, InGovern Research Services.