Microsoft is launching a new datacenter region in Sweden next year, and in line with the company's commitment to fighting climate change, has vowed that the deployments in the country will be among the company's most advanced and sustainable locations.
The cloud provider has previously pledged that it will use 100% renewable energy in all of its buildings and datacenters by 2025. To support this goal in Sweden, Microsoft has announced that it will be more transparent about the way that energy consumption in its Swedish facilities is matched with renewable energy generation, thanks to a new service developed in partnership with European electricity producer Vattenfall.
Microsoft and Vattenfall have designed a technology called the 24/7 matching solution, which provides a more accurate way of matching electricity consumption with renewable energy. The technology has been used as a pilot in both Vattenfall and Microsoft's Swedish headquarters for the past year, with encouraging results[1].
To mitigate the impact of its data centers' power consumption, Microsoft purchases energy certificates, called Guarantees of Origin (GOs) in Europe, which are amounts of renewable energy that are calculated based on the building's average consumption of electricity over a year.
The process doesn't account for variations in demand over shorter time periods; and yet over the course of a day, for example, a building might need electrical supply from alternative sources of electricity, if the sun isn't shining or if the wind is too weak. Existing ways of monitoring consumption fail to go into this level of detail, which means that there is effectively no way of knowing the exact sources of a datacenter's energy consumption on an hour-by-hour basis.
Noelle Walsh, Microsoft's corporate vice president of cloud operations and innovations, said in a blog post[2]: "While we have seen