Reducing Carbon Emissions Through Microsoft Store Online and the Cloud

| Josh Henretig

msstoreUsing the download only service from MS Store could save a user up to 83% in terms of carbon emissions when compared to the more traditional fully packaged product distribution, shows a new research article from leading journal, ‘Environmental Science & Technology’. The article was co-authored by Dan Williams, Environmental Sustainability Research Manager at Microsoft UK and describes a method to model and quantify the energy consumption and thus carbon emissions of browsing for and delivering software over the internet, from data center to end user. The new approach to modeling the energy consumption of data across the internet is also considered to be applicable to any cloud-computing scenario.

The research most importantly includes a unique focus upon the energy consumption from each stage ofDan Williams, Environmental Sustainability Research Manager at Microsoft UK the data lifecycle and includes a variable that accounts for the efficiency of a server device. According to Dan Williams, “This is a unique method to the academic world and will enable a better analysis of a data transmission’s energy consumption due to the device efficiency variables.“ Williams also expects that the methodology will enable a new level of analysis of energy efficiency and consumption through the data lifecycle in many different areas of cloud computing and will be working with others in the scientific community in the future to drive this analysis and further development.

To achieve published status the article was peer reviewed and went through many rounds of questioning and revisions with some of the academic leaders in this area of science. The research was completed with data from the Microsoft Store online marketplace in the UK. The newly developed method includes how to model energy consumption from a server, network device and end user device.

Congrats to Dan and team on this important milestone!

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