Microsoft has made another big climate pledge. The company said Wednesday that it will work to power all its offices and data centers around the world with carbon-free energy 100 percent of the time by 2030.
This is a very different – and much larger – problem to solve than matching its global energy consumption by purchasing an equivalent amount of renewable energy, a goal Microsoft last year set out to achieve by 2025. Its impossible to power facilities with carbon-free energy around the clock in most places around the world today. Google set out to solve this problem for its global operation last year, also making 2030 the deadline.
“Moving forward we will be innovating our energy purchasing contracting to help bring more zero carbon energy onto the grid and move more high carbon intensity energy off the grid, helping to rebalance the carbon intensity of any grid on which we operate,” Microsoft chief environmental officer Lucas Joppa and corporate VP, cloud and innovations, Noelle Walsh wrote in a blog post. “We will match our purchasing of zero carbon energy with our consumption on an hourly basis. And we will do so on the same grid systems into which we are already connected.”
This is also different from another pledge Microsoft made in 2020, which was to remove all the carbon the company will have emitted as a result of its operations in its entire history from the planet’s atmosphere by 2030.
Taking bold action carbon emissions isn’t just a matter of these companies’ own desire to do good. Investors and executives of corporations whose IT budgets Microsoft and Google’s cloud computing businesses compete for are increasingly conscious of their environmental impact. Outsourcing to a cleaner cloud provider helps those enterprises achieve their own sustainability goals.
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