With just seven years left to achieve its 100% renewable energy goals, Microsoft said it would add as much as 2.5 gigawatts of solar power to its operations under a partnership with South Korea’s Hanwha Qcells.
Under the agreement announced today, Microsoft said it would work with Qcells to engineer, procure, and construct solar power installations using power purchase agreements. PPAs are a mechanism for companies and institutions to fund renewable or clean energy production within a region. Under these PPAs, customers agree to buy the power generated by these facilities or installations at a set price over a decade or two.
Microsoft has used PPAs extensively as it has worked to end its reliance on fossil fuels and other nonrenewable energy sources. However, Microsoft’s strategy for offsetting its carbon footprint has evolved over the past few years. In 2012, the Windows titan said it purchased enough renewable energy credits (REC) to offset the greenhouse gas emissions generated by its facilities.
But Redmond later moved away from RECs in favour of PPAs. According to Microsoft, PPAs are preferable because RECs can’t reliably guarantee that renewable energy is generated on the same grid as where it’s consumed.
As of last November, the software giant claims it has signed PPAs for more than 10 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity including 900MW of capacity for facilities in Ireland.
While Microsoft’s plan to end its reliance on non-renewable energy is commendable, it’s worth pointing out that only a fraction of the megacorp’s greenhouse gas emissions is attributable to either scope 1 or scope 2 sources. Scope 1 is emissions directly resulting from an organization’s operations, and scope 2 is emissions a company indirectly causes by having energy produced for it.
In other words, only a fraction of its emissions are directly generated by Microsoft facilities and vehicles or are generated by the utilities that provide power to them.
According to the corporation’s latest sustainability report [PDF], the vast majority of Microsoft’s emissions — 13.7 million metric tons of CO2 as of 2021 — are attributable to emissions from the purchase or sale of goods and services, the transportation of those services, and the use of those products over their lifetimes.
Unfortunately, while Microsoft says its primary emissions fell 16.9% in 2021, the business’s overall emissions increased by almost 23%. According to Redmond, this increase was driven by the growth of its cloud services business and a growth in sales.
Original Article – https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/26/microsoft_green_power/
