Microsoft has launched a software-as-a-service carbon accounting service for customers and restated its goal to be carbon negative matched by zero-carbon energy purchases by 2030. The Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability service includes services that gather and integrate real-time data to measure a company’s emissions performance against goals, so companies can report their emissions from the cloud.
“Organisations need to be able to record their environmental footprint, report to stakeholders, reduce their resource usage, remove their footprint through carbon offsets or recycling and replace high-footprint resources with low-footprint ones,” Judson Althoff, chief commercial officer at Microsoft, said. “Doing this effectively means moving away from manually inputting data into spreadsheets, and toward a more seamless data flow via data connectors that provide automated, accurate, real-time data and ultimately, turn those data-driven insights into action.”
The SaaS service aims to discover and connect to real-time data sources, accelerate data integration and reporting, provide accurate carbon accounting, measure performance against goals and enable intelligent insights for organisations to take more effective action. The company also says its new formulation, the 100/100/0, matches up with the vision the rest of the world should be following, a shift to electrification, coupled with the greening of that supply.
“Every net-zero scenario that scientists and politicians play out shares a common, and essential, element, a massive increase in electrification,” Lucas Joppa, chief environmental officer at Microsoft, said. “Powering vehicles and manufacturing plants with electricity holds the promise of wiping out vast sections of the global emissions portfolio. But this only happens if the electrons supplying the electricity are generated from zero-carbon energy sources (wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, or point-source carbon capture and sequestration) and then stored and transported to where they are needed.”
