Microsoft unveiled a new suite of sustainability initiatives Tuesday as part of its effort to zero-out the carbon debt the company has accrued over its lifespan.
The latest announcements include the largest single renewable energy investment Microsoft has ever made. The company is investing in 500 megawatts of renewable energy from Sol Systems, equivalent to the energy needed to power more than 70,000 homes in the U.S. per year. The investment will fund solar energy projects in the U.S. in under-resourced communities, according to Microsoft. The company will provide $50 million in grants to community organizations working on education, habitat restoration, clean energy programs, and job training.
Microsoft is partnering with six corporations — Maersk, Danone, Mercedes-Benz, Natura & Co., Nike, Starbucks, Unilever, and Wipro — to create Transform to Net Zero, a coalition dedicated toward creating a net-zero carbon economy. The Environmental Defense Fund is also a founding member.
The coalition is pledging to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Each company will share what it learns in pursuit of carbon reduction goals with the coalition and broader business community.
“We’re actively investing and we’re actively purchasing at the same time, and being able to operate in the market as both an investor and a consumer is a really critical step,” said Lucas Joppa, Microsoft’s chief environmental officer, during a virtual climate change event hosted Tuesday by Bloomberg Green.
Microsoft is also unveiling a new Sustainability Calculator of cloud customers to help them understand the carbon emissions generated by their cloud usage. The calculator uses AI and analytics to advise users on ways to reduce their carbon footprint and predict future emissions.
Microsoft pledged in January to become carbon negative by 2030 and remove more carbon than the company has put into the atmosphere since it launched by 2050. As part of Tuesday’s announcement, Microsoft also pledged to stop using diesel fuel to power backup generators in data centers. In addition to those programs, Microsoft was one of the first companies to implement an internal fee on carbon emissions that managers must budget for.
Though Microsoft has launched one of corporate America’s most aggressive climate change initiates, other big tech companies are following suit. Apple said Tuesday that it will ensure every product it sells will have a net-zero impact on global warming within 10 years, Axios reports.
Microsoft plans to remove 1 million metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere this year, and on Tuesday the company opened a request for proposals “to source that carbon removal from a range of nature- and technology-based solutions.”
“It’s incumbent, I believe, on Microsoft and other players in this space to make sure that we don’t just engage in these markets by ourselves,” Joppa said. “We engage in these markets on behalf of the rest of the world.”
