Software giant Microsoft has adopted a tool developed by contractor Skanska to track the carbon emissions of raw building materials, as it attempts to accelerate its work on sustainability.
The news emerged in a blog post last week by Microsoft’s chief environmental officer, Lucas Joppa.
Joppa unveiled five tools and partnership the company is using to reduce its emissions. Among those, is its decision to use the Embodied Carbon Calculator for Construction (EC3).
The calculator, introduced by Skanska and supported by the University of Washington Carbon Leadership Forum, Interface and C-Change Labs, will be used in Microsoft’s new campus remodel.
Microsoft has also partnered with one of its largest suppliers in China to develop and install an energy-smart building solution including solar panels, running on Microsoft Azure. The panels are estimated to have generated more than 250,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity in the past fiscal year.
And the company has shared the results of a new battery storage pilot in Virginia, where it has taken a battery that typically sits in its datacentre as a backup system and hooked it up to the grid to smooth so that it can store or discharge renewable energy as required, smoothing out the unpredictability of wind and solar power. The company has thousands of battery backup systems in its data centres, potentially allowing all of them to be used to help smooth out the delivery of renewable energy.
Joppa said: “Our planet is changing — sea levels are rising, weather is becoming more extreme and our natural resources are being depleted faster than the earth’s ecosystems can restore them. These changes pose serious threats to the future of all life on our tiny blue dot, and they challenge us to find new solutions, work together and leverage the diversity of human potential to help right the course."
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