Tag: Sustainability

For more than a decade, Microsoft has been investing to reduce the environmental impact of our operations while striving to support the digital transformation of more and more organizations and people around the world through cloud services.

We’re working continuously to deliver scalable, highly available and resilient cloud services to more than 1 billion customers across the globe while simultaneously building and operating more efficient and sustainable datacenters that will serve the world well. We’ve made a series of commitments to increase the amount of renewable energy that power our datacenters reaching the 50% mark in 2019 and we’ll hit the 60% mark this year, both well ahead of schedule.

As we work toward our next goal of hitting 70% by 2023 – on our way to powering our datacenters with 100% renewable energy – we’re continuing to expand our global cloud infrastructure with our sustainability goals in mind. We’ve chosen Arizona as the location for the development of new world-class datacenter campuses to support the growing demand for cloud and internet services in Arizona and across the Western United States.

We intend to develop our new datacenter campuses in El Mirage and Goodyear, Arizona to be among the most sustainably designed and operated in the world – powered with 100% renewable energy. Arizona has been increasingly embracing the technology industry with a pool of growing talent, an affordable quality of life for employees, and as many 200 as sunny days a year making it an ideal location for investing in solar power.

We’re partnering with First Solar, an Arizona-based global leader in solar energy, on their Sun Streams 2 photovoltaic (PV) solar plant. The 150-megawatt plant utilizes some of the most sophisticated and eco-efficient solar technology available today, and will provide enough power to cover the energy load for each of our new datacenter campuses once the solar project is operational. The partnership also enables operating efficiencies and supports innovation in First Solar’s state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities through a variety of Microsoft’s intelligent cloud services, including Azure IoT Hub and SQL Data Warehouse. With this agreement, Microsoft now has renewable energy partnerships totaling nearly 1.5-gigawatts.

Our datacenter design and operations will contribute to the sustainability of our Arizona facilities. Microsoft’s datacenter designs are already more energy- and water-efficient than traditional enterprise datacenters. In Arizona, we’re also pursuing LEED Gold certification which will help conserve additional resources including energy and water, generate less waste and support human health. We’re committed to zero waste-certified operations for these new datacenters which means a minimum of  90% of waste will be diverted away from landfills through reduction, reuse and recycling efforts.

We recognize our datacenters consume more than energy, so we’re focused on efficiently utilizing, conserving and replenishing water. As a company, we have begun implementing a water replenishment strategy where we will balance what our operations consume in water-stressed regions by 2030. The advanced design of Microsoft’s datacenters means that our planned datacenters will use zero water for cooling for more than half the year. Our design uses outside air instead of water for cooling when temperatures are below 85 degrees Fahrenheit. When temperatures are above 85 degrees, an evaporative cooling system is used, which is similar to “swamp coolers” in residential homes. This system is highly efficient, using less electricity and a fraction of water used by other water-based cooling systems, such as cooling towers. Additionally, clean solar energy has other sustainability benefits, as it displaces the water needed in traditional process of generating electricity. First Solar estimates that energy generated from Sun Streams 2 will save as much as 356 million liters of water per year compared to traditional power generation.

We’re also looking beyond the datacenter to partnerships that can have a lasting impact on conserving and replenishing water in Arizona. Microsoft is investing in a water conservation project that helps sustain water levels in Lake Mead and will help prevent water shortage in Arizona. The effort is intended to increase Arizona’s water resiliency and help the state meet its Drought Contingency Plan Commitments. Microsoft’s investment in this project has also generated a one-to-one cash match from the Water Funder Initiative that will support the state’s efforts and further expand project impact. The project will benefit the Colorado River Indian Tribes, ultimately resulting in more water in Lake Mead and more efficient water infrastructure.

Microsoft is actively investing hundreds of millions of dollars to develop these world-class datacenter campuses in Arizona. We expect they will create more than 100 permanent jobs across a variety of functions, including mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and datacenter technicians, when the facilities are fully operational, and more than 1,000 construction jobs over the initial building phases.  Once the datacenters are operating, they’re expected to have an annual economic impact of approximately $20 million across communities in Arizona.

Microsoft is committed to being a good neighbor and full participant in the Arizona community. Through our Datacenter Community Development initiative, we are actively engaged in El Mirage, Goodyear, and across Arizona. In the past year, Microsoft invested more than $800,000 on projects that deliver social, economic and environmental benefits to the state.

We’d like to thank the citizens of Arizona, our partners, and government officials, especially Gov. Doug Ducey, Mayor Georgia Lord of Goodyear, and Mayor Alexis Hermosillo of El Mirage, the Arizona Commerce Authority, Arizona Public Service and First Solar for their collaboration to help make our vision for sustainable datacenters and increased renewable energy in Arizona possible.

Tags: datacenters, Environmental Sustainability

If you walk into a Microsoft Store during the month of April, you may feel as if you are communing with nature.

For the first time, Microsoft is celebrating Earth Month in its stores by demonstrating how artificial intelligence can help sustain the planet, while also showcasing Microsoft’s commitment to environmental sustainability.

AI for Earth is a multi-year, multimillion-dollar initiative launched in 2017 to deploy the full scale of Microsoft’s products, policies and partnerships across four key areas:

The goal is to transform the way society monitors, models, and manages Earth’s natural resources. This April, every Microsoft Store in the U.S., Canada, Puerto Rico and Australia includes a demonstration of the Seek by iNaturalist app.

The app encourages outdoor exploration and learning by using image recognition technology powered by the Microsoft Azure platform to help identify plants and animals from people’s photos. Users are encouraged to explore nature in their neighborhood by earning badges for finding different species and completing challenges.

The Seek app does not collect personally identifiable information. An account is not needed and all achievements and badges are stored on your device. However, it is relying on a computer vision model trained solely on photos submitted and identified by the iNaturalist community. The iNaturalist users who choose to share their photos are creating quality data for other nature lovers seeking to better understand and protect nature.

“Part of the power of AI is the more people use it, the better it gets,” said Sandra Andrews, head of marketing and experience for Microsoft Store. “By taking a picture of a plant or wildlife, you are doing your part to make the system smarter while becoming a citizen scientist.”

Andrews envisions the Microsoft Store retail experience as a great opportunity to teach and engage customers. “We want our customers to feel a sense of surprise and delight,” Andrews says. “Most retail environments feel transactional, but at Microsoft Store we want our customer experience to be more interactive. It’s about helping you achieve more and about bringing that technology to life. We want to make you aware of how technology can positively impact your life.”

For Andrews, Earth Month is a perfect opportunity to give customers more than just a typical retail experience.

“We work to make Microsoft come to life in our retail stores, which I think about as learning centers, making them destinations to help people achieve more,” she says. “We are a physical manifestation of the Microsoft mission statement: to help every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.”

The Earth Month experience at Microsoft retail outlets also helps demonstrate the company’s commitment to the environment. For example:

Other in-store Earth Month initiatives:

• Microsoft partnered with The Nature Conservancy (TNC) this year and will donate $50 per transaction in April to the nonprofit’s Plant a Billion Trees initiative, which aims to plant 1 billion trees by 2025. With each transaction, Microsoft will help TNC plant 25 trees up to a total of $25,000.
• Microsoft Store, which provides a recycling program year-round for when you buy a new device, has amped up the program for Earth Month. For every recycled laptop, tablet, phone or gaming console, Microsoft will also donate to TNC’s tree-planting program.

Top image: Margie Strite, left, Microsoft Store community development specialist, takes a customer through the Seek by iNaturalist in-store experience. 

Related:

Since 2009, Microsoft has made and met a series of commitments to reduce the company’s carbon footprint. While we’ve made progress toward our goal of cutting our operational carbon emissions by 75 percent by 2030, the magnitude and speed of the world’s environmental changes have made it increasingly clear that we must do more. And we are taking new steps to do just that.

Today, we are announcing that we will nearly double our internal carbon fee to $15 per metric ton on all carbon emissions. This internal Microsoft “tax” was established in 2012 to hold our business divisions financially responsible for reducing their carbon emissions. The funds from this higher fee will both maintain Microsoft’s carbon neutrality and help us take a tech-first approach that will put sustainability at the core of every part of our business and technology to work for sustainable outcomes. In practice, this means we’ll continue to keep our house in order and improve it, while increasingly addressing sustainability challenges around the globe by engaging our strongest assets as a company – our employees and our technologies.

Today, I’d like to share new steps we’re taking in four areas:

Building sustainable campuses and data centers

We will continue to build, renovate and operate our campuses in a manner that reduces our impact on the environment. At our headquarters in Redmond, Washington, we have started work to construct 17 new buildings totaling 2.5 million square feet. We will remove fossil fuels from these new buildings and run this new addition, as well as the rest of our campus, on 100 percent carbon-free electricity. We are also reducing the amount of carbon associated with the construction materials of our new buildings by at least 15 percent, with a goal of reaching 30 percent, through a new online tool. Combined with our smart building technology, Microsoft will be the first large corporate campus to reach zero-carbon and zero-waste goals.

In our data centers, we will continue to focus on R&D for efficiency and renewable energy. In 2016, we announced that we would power our data centers with more renewable energy, setting a 50 percent target by the end of 2018 and topping 60 percent early in the next decade while continuing to improve from there. We hit the first target nearly a year ahead of schedule, and today we are sharing the news that we will reach the 60 percent milestone before the end of this year. We’re therefore setting our next milestone on the path to 100 percent renewable energy, aiming to surpass the 70 percent target by 2023. We’ll also launch a new data-driven circular cloud initiative using the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor performance and streamline our reuse, resale and recycling of data center assets, including servers.

We will also add water to our long-standing carbon and energy commitments, launching a new water replenishment strategy where we will replace what our operations consume in water-stressed regions by 2030.

Accelerating research through data science

Data is a critical part of our work and a global transition to a low-carbon future. Data can help tell us about the health of our planet, including the conditions of our air, water, land and the well-being of our wildlife. But we need technology’s help to capture this vast amount of data and convert it into actionable intelligence. Despite living in the Information Age, when it comes to environmental data we are still too often flying without real insights.

We founded our AI for Earth program in 2017 with this challenge in mind. Since then, we’ve launched two new APIs that help provide the scale and flexibility to transform how people working on sustainability issues process data and generate valuable insights. More than 230 grantees are now using Azure and AI to create new models and discover new insights. But we have learned there’s still more we can do to accelerate this work.

Today, we’re 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 our cloud, we will advance and accelerate the work of grantees and researchers around the world. We will also continue work to bring new APIs and applications to the AI for Earth gallery and mature projects into platform-level services as we’ve done with land cover mapping.

Helping our customers build sustainable solutions

As the world’s needs heighten, we are working more closely than ever with our customers to use digital technology and AI to address sustainability challenges. We are making this an increasing focus across every part of our company, and in the coming months we’ll share more details about our plans to develop and deploy products to facilitate our customers’ and partners’ growth with sustainability in mind.

Already we’re helping empower our customers and partners with new technology to help them drive efficiencies, transform their businesses, and create their own solutions to create a more sustainable planet. At Microsoft we call this infusion of technology tech intensity, and we’re seeing it propel sustainable growth around the globe. Let me share a few examples.

Companies like Ecolab and Ørsted are improving water conservation and efficiency of renewable energy with Microsoft Azure, IoT and AI. Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy has deployed a digital solution called Hermes with autonomous drones to inspect turbines and is now building on this with Azure AI to improve operations further to help make renewable energy more affordable and the future more sustainable. Bühler, one of the world’s leading grain processing providers, keeps food healthy and safe for 2 billion people every day. Their goal is to reduce 30 percent of waste and 30 percent of energy that goes into food production processing for customers by 2020. Silvia Terra, a small start-up, is focused on using AI to improve our understanding of forests and better manage these economic and environmental assets. Through its work with AI for Earth, they’ve completed a national inventory of forests, down to the tree level.

These companies’ technology breakthroughs offer a blueprint for sustainable economic growth. New research we commissioned with Pricewaterhouse Coopers UK (PwC UK) shows that greater adoption of AI across even a few sectors has the potential to boost global GDP by up to 4.4 percent, while also reducing global greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 4 percent. This is approximately 2.4 gigatons of CO2, equivalent to zeroing out the 2030 annual emissions of Australia, Canada and Japan combined.

Advocating for environmental policy change

Finally, public policy has an important role in creating enabling environments to accelerate the reduction of carbon emissions. That is why we’re joining today the Climate Leadership Council (CLC). CLC is an international policy institute founded with business leaders – many of whom are our customers – as well as economists and environmental leaders to promote a national carbon pricing approach. In addition to our internal carbon tax, we supported the recent Washington state ballot measure on pricing carbon and believe it’s time for a robust national discussion on carbon pricing to lower emissions in an economically sound way.

Addressing these global environmental challenges is a big task. Meeting this raised ambition will take the work of everyone across Microsoft, as well as partnerships with our customers, policymakers and organizations around the world. This road map is far from complete, but it’s a first step in our renewed commitment to sustainability. Time is too short, resources too thin and the impact too large to wait for all the answers to act. There’s an incredible opportunity to be realized by acting, supported by data and technology, on climate change. We are starting our journey to embrace that challenge and enhance opportunities for everyone on the planet today.

Tags: Brad Smith, carbon fee, Environmental Sustainability