And even with out the tremendous particulars, Microsoft is offering a fairly good image of what it’s doing. Not one of the tools is a secret, simply the configuration. And that alone serves as an excellent instance for others.
“It’s an excellent sustainability story,” Howard stated. The hyperscalers have spectacular sustainability initiatives, and “if the leaders are getting in a sure route – which is all about being good group stewards and good stewards of pure sources – these are the issues that form of flip into developments.”
Microsoft’s group pledge
Essentially the most economical option to cool a facility is thru evaporative cooling. It’s additionally the best consumption technique, which is how Microsoft discovered itself consuming tons of of thousands and thousands of liters of water to chill its information facilities.
Microsoft measures water effectivity by means of the metric known as water utilization effectiveness (WUE), which divides complete annual water consumption for humidification and cooling by the full vitality consumption for IT tools.
In its final fiscal 12 months, Microsoft information facilities operated with a mean WUE of 0.30 L/kWh, a 39% enchancment in comparison with 2021, when it reported a worldwide common of 0.49 L/kWh.
There’s a slight trade-off, nonetheless. Historically, water is evaporated to scale back the ability demand for cooling water. Microsoft is changing evaporative techniques with mechanical cooling, which has a slight improve in energy draw and thus would improve Microsoft’s energy utilization effectiveness (PUE), the metric used to measure the vitality effectivity of knowledge facilities.
