(Photo Credit: Microsoft)This week, Microsoft announced it is doubling its internal carbon fee to $15 per metric ton on all carbon emissions. This internal Microsoft “tax” was established in 2012 to hold its business divisions financially responsible for reducing their carbon emissions. According to Microsoft, the funds from this higher fee will both maintain the company’s carbon neutrality and help it take a “tech-first” approach that will put sustainability at the core of every part of business and technology to work for sustainable outcomes.
The tech giant also announced several other initiatives aimed at sustainability in current and future operations. They include:
Carbon-Free Electricity for Offices and Data Centers: Microsoft, in a blog post on its website, says it will make sure current and future campuses and data centers run on 100% carbon free electricity.
Using Data Science for Research: Microsoft says it’s committing to hosting the world’s leading environmental data science sets on Azure. These large government datasets contain satellite and aerial imagery, among other things, and require petabytes of storage. By making them available in the Microsoft cloud, the company hopes to advance and accelerate the work of grantees and researchers around the world. Microsoft will also continue work to bring new APIs and applications to the AI for Earth gallery and mature projects into platform-level services as it has done with land cover mapping.
Just last month, Microsoft and EDP Renewables signed two 15-year power purchase agreements today totaling 125 megawatts of power from a wind farm in Ohio. These deals bring Microsoft’s directly purchased renewable energy portfolio to almost 1.4 gigawatts.
The 125-MW Timber Road IV Wind Farm in Paulding County, Ohio is expected to be operational this year, Microsoft and EDP Renewables say. Once online, it will be EDPR’s third wind farm in the county and their third in the state. For Microsoft, the wind farm represents the company’s fifth project in the larger PJM region.
The 4th Annual Environmental Leader & Energy Manager Conference takes place May 13 – 15, 2019 in Denver. Learn more here.
