Today, Microsoft released its ninth annual Citizenship Report, which provides an overview and assessment of our citizenship work over the past fiscal year. The report includes goals and achievements in areas including nonprofit partnerships, technology donations and youth programs. Environmental sustainability is also a major part of this year’s Citizenship report, coming on the heels of meeting our 2012 goal to reduce carbon emissions by 30 percent per unit of revenue compared with 2007 and our commitment to carbon neutrality. The report also notes Microsoft’s purchase of 1.1 billion kilowatt-hours of green power, the third most of any U.S. company.
This year, Microsoft set a companywide goal to be carbon neutral by the end of FY13 through a new internal carbon fee, which will incentivize energy efficiency and investment in renewable energy sources. Energy efficiency remains an important part of how we do business, and Microsoft is taking steps to reduce the footprint of cloud computing through the development of modular data centers that use 50 percent less energy and only consume one percent of the water of traditional data centers. We have also implemented a program that charges energy costs back to specific divisions for all labs in Puget Sound. This motivates business divisions to save money by reducing energy consumption.
Microsoft has made great strides toward environmentally sustainable practices in fiscal year 2012 and will continue to do so moving forward. Along with our carbon neutrality commitment, we will also work with partners on customer solutions in five key areas: greener IT, buildings, power and energy infrastructure, transportation, and resource management along with collaboration with industry peers to develop metrics like Carbon Usage Effectiveness and Water Usage Effectiveness that will help make data centers as efficient as possible.
Environmental sustainability is a central part of Microsoft’s overall commitment to being a responsible corporate citizen. As a provider of technology solutions, we are using our company as a living laboratory to explore how IT can help us drive responsible environmental practices, from our data centers and offices to how our employees travel.
You can read more about this year’s Citizenship Report in this blog post on Microsoft on the Issues.