The UN's Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) last month, didn’t manage to achieve the outcome that the world needs but at least at the debate is about what we should be doing rather than whether we need do anything. And of course technology companies can play a role so it was great to see Microsoft visible this year in a positive way. Below is a summary of the Microsoft position.
Microsoft provided a delegation participating in a series of briefings, events, and partnerships to showcase for policymakers and other COP15 attendees the power of information technology (IT) to help address the daunting global energy and climate challenges the world faces. Microsoft envisions a clean energy ecosystem where information technology:
Our participation reflects our Policy Statement on Climate Change. That statement advocates that governments adopt market-based emissions reduction frameworks which are stable and predictable over the long-term to foster private investment in sustainable low-carbon and carbon-free energy sources and technologies.
A growing number of governments and many scientists have endorsed the goal of limiting global average temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. According to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) meeting this goal will require a global reduction of greenhouse gas emissions of 50-85% by 2050. The scale of those proposed reductions is significant, but we see many ways that the power of information technology can help contribute solutions. A report by The Climate Group on behalf of the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), with independent analysis by McKinsey & Company found that by 2020, deployment of existing IT applications ranging from virtual meetings to building efficiency can cut global carbon emissions 15%, eliminating more carbon emissions annually than are currently released by all sources in the United States.
We believe that policymakers can accelerate these reductions and fully optimize the contribution that IT can make to a sustainable energy economy by:
Leading by example. Governments can help save energy and benefit the environment by applying power management and virtualization to their IT infrastructure and by promoting telework. These initiatives can yield significant cost savings and efficiency gains while demonstrating best practices and helping build the market for IT solutions that reduce energy use.
Investing in basic research, enabling infrastructure and new technologies. Governments need to adequately fund basic science research and research into renewable and sustainable low-carbon energy sources. To unlock the potential for cloud computing-based energy applications, businesses and citizens need affordable, high-quality access to the Internet. Government incentives should be directed toward ensuring that broadband reaches remote areas and underserved populations, with a particular focus on providing state-of-the-art connectivity to schools, libraries and hospitals.
Reforming energy regulations to foster demand-side management. Regulators who oversee energy generation and distribution should promote real-time pricing policies that open the market for demand-side management. Ensuring that individuals and third parties have access to energy usage and pricing information, subject to appropriate privacy protections, will spark innovation as businesses compete to use this data and drive reductions in energy and CO2.
Promote intellectual property rights. Governments can provide a strong policy and legal basis to incentivize private-sector investments in a clean energy ecosystem by ensuring that well-functioning intellectual property systems are in place. Such systems provide the private sector with the confidence to invest in innovations and share breakthroughs to accelerate solutions to the energy and climate problems confronting us. For many countries — especially the poorest and most vulnerable developing countries — intellectual property protection alone will not be sufficient to address the climate challenges they confront. Developing countries will require support to identify and prioritize the technology solutions and opportunities available for climate change mitigation and adaptation and will require capacity-building to adopt and deploy appropriate solutions.
Promoting broadly accessible solutions. A sustainable energy ecosystem should seek to harness the power of widely available technologies such as cell phones and PCs. Policies to promote connectivity and broadband access help to enable wide participation in a sustainable energy ecosystem. To foster innovation, policymakers should ensure that smart grids and other energy and environmental IT applications promote security, privacy and interoperability without mandating the use of specific technologies.
Achieving long-term growth that is economically and environmentally sustainable will require dramatic shifts in our energy ecosystem. We believe that IT has a vital role to play in enabling these shifts, by allowing economies to operate far more efficiently and by accelerating the innovation needed to reach the next generation of renewable zero-carbon energy sources. The world's most powerful supercomputers and broadly available existing technologies such as cell phones and PCs all have a role to play in enabling a clean energy ecosystem. Microsoft is strongly committed to continuing to invest in development of a range of business and consumer solutions and services that contribute to solving these challenging issues. We welcome the chance to work together on these solutions with our partners, customers, suppliers, policymakers and other key stakeholders. We encourage policymakers to adopt policies to stimulate the technology innovation needed to sustain healthy economies and ecosystems in an increasingly carbon-constrained and energy-hungry world.
IT makes our economy more energy efficient, and enables individuals, businesses, and governments to understand their environmental impact and reduce their energy use. We're developing technologies that let people monitor and improve their use of limited resources like energy and water. We're also supporting government policies that promote energy efficiency, incentivize research, and help create "green" technology and jobs.
Addressing Energy and Environmental Challenges Policy Brief — Executive Summary (PDF file, 280 KB)
Addressing Energy and Environmental Challenges Policy Brief (PDF file, 502 KB)
Eye On Earth was first launched in May 2008 with WaterWatch, an application presenting water-quality data on an interactive site powered by Bing Maps. With this new update, Eye On Earth gets not just a fresh look and feel for both air and bathing water information, it also becomes one of the newest applications built on Windows Azure and SQL Azure hosting the Geo Observatory Data Store. The site's user interface provides interactive information from Europe-wide to street level, based on data from water and air-quality measurement stations and citizens' input. It translates scientific data into easily understandable terms and makes it available in 24 languages.
In addition to near real-time data on specific air pollutants available from air-quality measurement stations, AirWatch presents air-quality information based on Europe-wide modeling covering larger areas. This allows users to get an indication of the air quality anywhere in Europe and not only in the proximity of measurement stations. Users will also see how other viewers described the air in a particular area
More information about Eye On Earth is available at http://www.eyeonearth.eu.
Microsoft is actively working to apply the power of software to the climate and energy challenges the world faces. As an example IT's potential, McKinsey found that by 2020, IT applications ranging from virtual meetings to building efficiency can eliminate more carbon emissions annually than are currently released by all sources in the United States. Microsoft's efforts focus on using technology to improve energy efficiency, accelerating research breakthroughs, and reducing our own impact on the environment. Find out more here.
Advancing the Energy Efficiency of IT The leading energy-efficient PCs now entering the market use about the same energy as a single compact fluorescent light bulb, and Microsoft continues to help lead the IT industry in improving the energy efficiency of our products:
We improved the energy efficiency of the Windows® operating system with increasingly sophisticated energy-saving features and are building new requirements for energy efficiency into our product design process for future operating systems. Working with industry partners, we designed Windows 7 to maximize energy efficiency, cutting customers' energy costs and carbon footprints. Changes include improvements to the core operating system to reduce energy use and new tools for IT professionals to deploy power management policies and troubleshoot energy efficiency problems.
As more computing moves to the cloud, Microsoft is paying particular attention to addressing energy use and environmental impacts of our datacenters. Microsoft's new datacenters consume 50 percent less energy for the same level of output than datacenters built just three years ago through innovations in sensor and monitoring equipment, high-efficiency container-based designs and air cooling systems that reduce the need for mechanical chillers. Our newly opened datacenter in Dublin is officially recognized by the European Commission's Sustainable Energy Europe Campaign as a best practice for energy efficiency.
Microsoft is sharing best practices and technical guidance for energy efficiency with our customers, governments, NGOs, and our hardware and software partners to reduce the energy use and environmental impact of information technology. Microsoft Research is supporting cutting-edge research projects to advance energy efficiency in computing.
Using IT to Advance Energy Efficiency Economy-Wide and Enable Research Breakthroughs Microsoft sees great energy-saving potential from existing technology ranging from high performance supercomputers to widely available PCs and mobile phones:
A recent World Wildlife Fund study found that increasing virtual meetings and telecommuting using existing solutions could eliminate more than 3 billion tons of CO2 emissions over the next few decades. Microsoft found that by encouraging employees to use our unified communications telework tools in place of travel, we reduced travel per employee 10 percent in fiscal year 2008, eliminating 100 million miles of air travel and 17,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions. Many of our customers are relying on these solutions to reduce employee travel.
In February 2009, Microsoft launched the Environmental Sustainability Dashboard for Microsoft Dynamics AX. The new toolset enables midsize businesses to collect data on core environmental performance indicators for energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Based on this information, organizations can more easily monitor and work to reduce their energy use and carbon footprint.
Starting in the United States, Microsoft has launched a free online application called Microsoft Hohm that helps consumers analyze where energy is being consumed in the household, compare their energy usage with that of others in their area, learn ways to save, and track improvements. Microsoft has developed partnerships with leading utilities to enable users to automatically view their electricity and gas use. Data feeds are already available for hundreds of thousands of homes, and this will expand to over 9 million homes by the end of 2009.
Microsoft recently released the Smart Energy Reference Architecture (SERA), a document intended to help utilities understand how Microsoft technologies address their implementation of the smart grid and smart energy ecosystem. SERA provides Microsoft's and our partners' comprehensive approach to how an integrated utility of the future could work. It identifies an architecture that utilities could use to build a solid foundation for their ongoing adaptation of smart grid technologies.
Computer scientists at Microsoft Research are collaborating directly on research and modeling with some of the world's leading climate scientists and are working to provide the scientific community with new tools to improve their capabilities to analyze disparate datasets that can help advance clean energy and other breakthroughs. We are also partnering with groups such as the United Nations Environment Programme and European Environment Agency to help citizens and policymakers visualize and understand the environmental implications of climate change.
Microsoft believes technology and research will be critical in helping accelerate breakthroughs in environmental challenges, and is investing through its Microsoft Research group in the following ways:
Enabling fundamental advances in science
Modeling the potential impacts of climate change
Providing access to computing resources for the scientific community
Enabling fundamental advances in science: Microsoft is working with the scientific community to monitor environmental conditions and develop computational methods and tools to help scientists correlate and analyze data across research efforts.
MSR's Computational Ecology and Environmental Science Program is focused on developing novel computational tools and methods to predict and mitigate the rapid changes occurring in the earth's life support systems working with the scientific community to identify critical problems and develop novel computational methods and tools for addressing these problems.
SciScope : Microsoft External Research is developing an online search engine called SciScope that is helping scientists find and retrieve relevant data. SciScope enables researchers to search multiple environmental data repositories simultaneously and retrieve information in a consistent format.
Project Trident is a collaborative project between the University of Washington, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and Microsoft, to provide Project NEPTUNE, a cabled network sensor, with a scientific workflow workbench for oceanography. The workflow workbench is implemented on top of Windows Workflow Foundation.
MSR's SenseWeb project aims to build an open and diverse community of sensor data publishers/consumers and to develop shared infrastructure and tools for data publishing, data management, and data querying and visualization. The SensorMap platform, developed from the SenseWeb project, transparently provides mechanisms to archive and index data, to process queries, and to aggregate and present results on Web interfaces such as Virtual Earth.
Modeling the potential impacts of climate change: Microsoft is helping to create advanced modeling technologies that will improve our understanding of global and local climate changes and the environmental consequences of human activity on species and ecosystems.
Scientists at Microsoft Research Cambridge collaborated with scientists at the University of Oxford, England and the Freie Universitat, Berlin to develop new technology to study individual and populations of animals and their sensitivity and response to changes in their environment in real-time. Better understanding, and early identification of changes in the natural behavior of animal species can afford a vital 'early warning' system for understanding responses of species and ecosystems to environmental changes such as climate, pollution and human activity.
Microsoft Research Cambridge is also studying how an improved understanding of forest dynamics is needed to better predict environmental change. The research suggests that a new generation of realistic forest modeling, which is urgently needed and now within reach, will significantly improve an understanding of how forests work, how tree species respond to deforestation, and how forests impact climate regulation and environmental change
Providing access to computing power for the scientific community: Microsoft will work with leading scientists around the world to provide access to our facilities, research, collaboration tools, and computing power to help them advance scientific research.
MSR collaborated with hydrology scientists at the University of California, Berkeley Water Center and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to build a "Digital Watershed". The project is designed to help researchers gain an accurate picture of the health of a watershed by acquiring existing hydrologic data to understand historic conditions on key watersheds in California. Scientists also use Microsoft Virtual Earth technology to help visualize spatial data sources and their relation to the landscape.
MSR has helped stimulate novel research into increasing energy efficiency through the Power Aware Computing Awards. Grants given to four recipients totaling $500,000 on proposals that ranged from Data Centers through compilers and micro-architecture, to instrumentation and the measurement of energy use.
To stay connected with Microsoft's environmental initiatives please visit Microsoft's environmental Web site, its "Software Enabled Earth" blog or get the latest news on Twitter.