In January 2020, Microsoft launched a company-wide focus on sustainability by announcing an ambitious goal and a detailed plan to become carbon negative by 2030, and by 2050 to remove from the environment more carbon than they have emitted since they were founded.
To oversee this plan, they have assembled a team of experts including Microsoft Chief Environmental Officer, Lucas Joppa, and hired veterans of the energy sector like Darryl Willis, who is a geophysicist by training and spent 28 years with BP and a stint with Google before becoming Microsoft's Vice President of Energy.
Last week I spoke with Mr. Willis, who detailed the efforts Microsoft is making to achieve these lofty goals.
I started out by asking about the source of Microsoft's emissions. It's obvious how a car or a coal-fired power plant generates emissions, so I wanted a better understanding of the nature of Microsoft's emissions.
"When it comes to overall energy consumption", Mr. Willis explained, "China is first, second is the U.S., and the third is datacenters." He added that energy demand is expected to continue growing, and thus there is a growing need to address the associated carbon emissions.
Mr. Willis said that datacenters are the primary source of Microsoft's emissions, but they have pledged to power their datacenter operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025. To address historical emissions, they launched a $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund that invests in global carbon reduction, capture and removal technologies.
Source: Microsoft
He went on to explain that Microsoft identified the energy sector as one that generates and uses a lot of data, but not to its fullest extent. The company realized it was great at analyzing and leveraging data and brought in Mr. Willis for his industry expertise to better understand where the challenges and opportunities are to help customers make sense of their data and navigate the energy transition.
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Now, since Microsoft made its pledge last year, the company has seen a lot of interest in what it's doing not only because of what it offers from a digital standpoint, but because it is openly talking about its relationship to carbon. Mr. Willis also said Microsoft has incumbent relationships with about 70-80% of the energy companies through its relationship with hardware and software, and has reached out to many of these companies to figure out how they can work together to address the growing problem of carbon emissions.
Project Highlights
Microsoft is involved in numerous partnerships with energy companies and governments to achieve its objectives. The company supplied a sampling of those projects:
In addition, Microsoft launched a partnership for 500 megawatts of renewable energy, and is engaged in projects to utilize hydrogen (the details of which Mr. Willis couldn't discuss), eliminate dependency on diesel generators, and invest in communities disproportionately affected by environmental challenges.
Mr. Willis concluded: "The demand for energy continues to increaseâ¦energy is the one thing that everyone needs, but sometimes everyone loves to hate. We want to make sure we're instrumental in playing a role in helping to deliver energy to the world and working with customers and companies and countries, frankly, who are trying to deliver clean energy to the world. The energy transition is real, it's upon us. It is accelerating and it is hard. It's going to take all of us to deliver the energy transition. We see ourselves as being an accelerator to that journey."
By Robert Rapier
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