Microsoft will purchase 175 megawatts of
wind energy from the Pilot Hill Wind Project in Illinois, about 60 miles
south of Chicago, as part of a 20-year agreement announced Tuesday.
It’s the second such deal in as many years and indicative of Microsoft’s growing commitment to renewable energy and sustainability.
When it comes online next year, Pilot Hill will be Microsoft’s largest wind project
and one of the biggest corporate wind purchases from a single facility,
generating more than enough energy to power Microsoft’s Chicago
datacenter. The total output of the project is equivalent to the
electricity consumption of 70,000 homes in Illinois.
Microsoft purchased 110 megawatts of energy from the Keechi Wind Farm in Texas in 2013.
“Microsoft is focused on transforming the energy supply chain for cloud services from the power plant to the chip,” he explains. “Commitments like Pilot Hill ensure a cleaner grid to supply energy to our datacenters.”
The power purchase agreement with Microsoft provided the long-term revenue certainty needed to get Pilot Hill off the ground, says Ryan Pfaff, EDF Renewable Energy’s executive vice president of development.
“As the cost of renewable energy continues to decline, it is encouraging to see leading corporations investing in the sector based not only on their desire to positively impact the environment, but also because it simply makes good business sense,” he adds.
The deal is financed in part by Microsoft’s internal carbon fee, assessed to business groups based on their use of energy, primarily in the form of electricity and air travel. In short, requiring the company’s various divisions to be responsible for offsetting their carbon emissions.
Microsoft has come a long way in its evolution toward sustainability since announcing two years ago that it would go carbon neutral.
The goal of the carbon offset program is “simple,” wrote Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s chief environmental strategist, on the Green Blog in May 2012: “Be lean. Be green. Be accountable.”
The
Purus River in Brazil’s Acre State, a rain forest conservation program
Microsoft is participating in using carbon-offset funds.
One example is Brazil’s Acre State, a project that works with local groups to provide alternative models of economic development that protect the health of the local ecosystem.
Another is Mt. Kenya, a project that combines reforestation with community development activities, enabling households to improve access to food and create additional sources of income beyond subsistence farming.
The carbon fee has also been instrumental in helping Microsoft meet its objective to transform the energy supply chain toward greater efficiency and reduced environmental impact.
In addition to delivering new renewable energy projects to the grid, the company is also investing in distributed generation technologies, or creating and storing energy as close as possible to the location where it will ultimately be used. Microsoft has an interest in distributed generation both as it relates to the company’s physical offices spread throughout the world, as well as its datacenters, with their energy-hungry servers and processers.
In Silicon Valley at Microsoft’s Mountain View, California campus, 2,288 solar panels covering more than 31,000 square feet of rooftop generate 480 kilowatts and equal an annual savings of 15 percent in energy consumption for the more than 2,600 employees at that location.
Solar panels on the rooftop of Microsoft’s Mountain View, California campus. Credit: Dennis Agatep.
This spring, Microsoft announced a three-year agreement with the University of Texas at San Antonio. Students will work hand-in-hand with Microsoft researchers to explore “fast-start generation” technologies such as micro-turbines — combustion machines that produce both heat and electricity on a smaller scale — in an effort to develop distributed generation technologies.
And just last month, Microsoft was part of a project... Read the rest of this post ----->
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