Microsoft Pledges To Cut Emissions By 75% By 2030

November 15th, 2017 by Joshua S Hill

Microsoft has announced this week that it intends to cut its carbon emissions by 75% by 2030 against a 2013 baseline, making continued progress with its carbon neutrality and renewable energy commitments while also making future investments in energy efficiency.

Over the last month, Microsoft has made two announcements backing up its claims to be tackling climate change and taking its emissions seriously. In October the company signed a new Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with GE in Ireland for the electricity generated by the 37 MW (megawatt) Tullahennel wind farm in County Kerry which will go towards powering Microsoft Cloud services based in Ireland.

“Microsoft is proud to be deepening our long history of investment and partnership in Ireland with this agreement,” said Christian Belady, general manager, Datacenter Strategy at Microsoft.

“Our commitment will help bring new, clean energy to the Irish grid, and contains innovative elements that have the potential to grow the capacity, reliability and capability of the grid. This will make it easier to incorporate new clean power sources like wind energy, and that is good for the environment, for Ireland and for our company.”

A month later, Microsoft announced its second European wind project deal in the Netherlands with Swedish power company Vattenfall, in which Microsoft will acquire 100% of the power generated from the 180 MW Wieringermeer wind farm which sits adjacent to Microsoft’s local data center operations, a regional hub which delivers Microsoft Cloud services to European customers, the Middle East, and Africa, as well as global customers.

Fast-forward a fortnight and Brad Smith, Microsoft’s President and Chief Legal Officer announced on the company’s website that it had pledged to reduce its operational carbon emissions 75% by 2030 against a 2013 baseline.

“We’ll do this through continued progress against our carbon neutrality and renewable energy commitments, as well as investments in energy efficiency,” said Smith in a blog post published on Tuesday.

“This puts Microsoft on a path, as a company, to meet the goals set in the Paris climate agreement, which is a level of decarbonization that many scientists believe is necessary to keep global temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius. We estimate this will help avoid more than 10 million metric tons of carbon emissions by 2030.”

“As we expand our global cloud infrastructure, we will increasingly turn to renewable energy because it is a clean power source and gives us better financial predictability. It’s good for the environment, our customers and our business.”











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