Microsoft has pledged to make its operations carbon negative by 2030.
For a company the size of Microsoft, that’s no small feat. The company employs more than 168,000 people across the globe, with operations from Serbia to Mozambique, and it’s going to have to buy a lot of carbon credits and come up with some novel ways to power its buildings to meet its goal.
On Tuesday, Microsoft offered a glimpse of one of the ways it will cut emissions at its Redmond headquarters: A new Thermal Energy Center as part of the multibillion-dollar overhaul of its east Redmond campus.
The center, a three-story building that will provide energy to the new buildings, is “almost entirely carbon-free,” Microsoft said in a recent blog post.
The company has torn down several of the Redmond headquarters’ original buildings — many 34 years old — to make way for 18 new buildings, totaling 2.5 million square feet with room for up to 8,000 new employees.
The Thermal Energy Center that’s part of the project includes 2.5 acres containing 875 geowells, a system of pipes that transfer the earth’s relatively warmer or cooler temperatures to structures depending on the season.
Three hundred thousand gallons of water will flow through more than 220 miles of pipe to exchange heat across the wells and the new campus in what Microsoft described as a closed-loop system.
Microsoft said the system is expected to cut energy consumption on the newly refurbished portion of its Redmond campus by more than 50% compared with a typical utility plant.
Here’s how it works: Geoexchange systems use the difference in temperature between soil below the ground and ambient air. The soil remains a constant temperature of about 55 degrees throughout the year while the ambient air temperature changes.
During winter, fluid will flow through looped pipes, transferring heat from the ground to Microsoft’s new buildings. In the summer, the reverse will happen: The pipes will transfer cool temperatures of the subsurface soil to the buildings, where the air is relatively warm.
Microsoft says it will reduce its carbon footprint, not just through new infrastructure like what it’s building in Redmond, but by expanding its internal carbon fee, which has been in place since 2012 and is paid by each business division based on its emissions, to include its entire supply chain.
Tech companies like Microsoft have increasingly mounted public campaigns to curb Earth-warming emissions and demonstrate that green infrastructure can cut costs and forge new industries.
Amazon, which has ambitions to cut its carbon emissions to net-zero by 2040, has pledged to build a fleet of 100,000 electric delivery vans, with 10,000 of them on the road by next year.
Late last year, Amazon said it plans to add 26 giant wind and solar projects to its infrastructure, making it the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world. In all, the company said the renewable energy projects that power its operations generate enough electricity to power 1.7 million homes for a year.
The Thermal Energy Center will run on renewable energy that Microsoft buys from a regional utility, the company said.
In addition, the system is expected to enable Microsoft to use 8 million fewer gallons a year, which amounts to the volume of about a dozen Olympic swimming pools.
Building the plant in time for the first new campus office
building to open next year will be tricky. Microsoft said the Energy Center,
which was not initially part of the plans for the campus refurbishing project,
was the last building to begin construction, but it must be the first to be
completed.
