The windows-maker has made its largest purchase ever of wind energy, writes Beta News, standing by its commitment to use less fossil fuels and reduce its carbon footprint, bringing the company’s U.S. wind energy projects to 500 megawatts.
Brad Smith, the president and chief legal officer at Microsoft says that the latest deal brings the company one step closer to building a “responsible cloud.”
Smith also points out that the wind energy deal will make it more affordable for cities and states to switch to clean energy, and part of the plan involves Microsoft hooking up the backup generators at the data center to the local grid.
On Monday, Smith said in his blog post, “We announced earlier this year that roughly 44 percent of the electricity consumed by Microsoft’s data centers comes from wind, solar and hydropower, and we committed to raising this to 50 percent by 2018 and to 60 percent by early in the next decade.”
Microsoft contracted with Allianz Risk Transfer (ART) to support the new, 178-megawatt Bloom Wind project in Kansas. The remaining 59 megawatts will come from a partnership with Black Hills, with the energy coming from the Happy Jack and Silver Sage wind farms in Wyoming.
“Microsoft is the first buyer to participate in this structure, which has the potential to bring clean energy projects online at a faster pace”, says Microsoft, according to Beta News.
ZD Net points out that Google has used a similar arrangement to fund the development of new wind farms in the south of Norway by agreeing to purchase their total output for 12 years. One 160-watt capacity wind farm is expected to be operational by late 2017. This will offer Google’s European data centers access to more renewable energy.
