Microsoft does point out its online GRI Index, which provides links to multiple documents where the company says readers can find this data. But it is frustratingly difficult to get a picture of the company’s environmental progress from what should be its main public sustainability document.
It is also notable that the company does not mention any concrete environmental goals, instead using vague aspirations such as “source more renewable power and continue to implement our more sustainable data center designs.”
The company has had such goals in the past, however: in last year’s sustainability report, Microsoft said it met a target of reducing its carbon intensity by 30 percent over 2007 levels.
Microsoft is one of only seven US companies participating in a pilot integrated reporting program run by the International Integrated Reporting Council.
Renewable energy and carbon offsets
The company invested $5.5 million in a demonstration project to power the Data Plant, a data center in Cheyenne, Wyo., that will use biogas from a wastewater treatment facility. Microsoft says it helped Turkey put nearly 465,000 megawatt hours of clean electricity back into its national power grid by investing in the 119 wind turbines of the Soma Wind Farm in the Manisa and Balikesir provinces.
Not included in the report – presumably, it occurred after the reporting period – is Microsoft’s agreement to buy all the output from the 110 MW Keechi Wind project, under its first long-term wind power purchase agreement.
Microsoft is also making research investments into sustainable energy solutions for its data centers.
The company says it offset more than 300,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions through a growing portfolio of innovative carbon-offset projects.
Efficiency
The company says it has “reduced resource use with data centers that use half the energy and between 1 to 3 percent of the water required to cool traditional data centers” – but does not say when it achieved this.
It does say that it is reducing data centers and networks’ energy consumption, and making them more reliable, by “tightly integrating resilient software across our cloud services.” It is also retrofitting data centers with lower-energy servers, compressor energy reduction and LED lighting.
The company implemented adiabatic cooling at its Dublin, Ireland data center, cutting energy costs per megawatt by up to 30 percent.
Microsoft says it dramatically increased insight into energy use at its 125-building, 500-acre Redmond, Wash., campus as part of its Energy-Smart Buildings initiative, helping cut energy costs by an estimated 6 to 10 percent (again, no time frame given). The company uses an interconnected energy-management system to identify savings opportunities by collecting 500 million data transactions from 30,000 pieces of equipment per day. In FY14, it has committed to extending similar programs to several US facilities.
