Brian Janous, Director of Energy Strategy for Microsoft, will be a keynote speaker at ELECTRIC POWER 2014. He recently spent a few minutes with ELECTRIC POWER discussing topics he will address during his remarks on Tuesday morning, April 1.
EP: Microsoft calculates an internal price of carbon for its business activities. How has this influenced its decisions relative to electricity use?
A. Microsoft’s Carbon Fee plays a critical role in how we make decisions about energy consumption and purchasing. Many companies place some value environmental sustainability, but for most this is a subjective assessment that must be measured against more concrete metrics such as ROI. As a result, you end up with inconsistent decisions across the organization related to the value of carbon for each initiative. What Microsoft’s Carbon Fee has done is place a transparent financial value on reducing carbon across the organization. As such, we can now include the environmental impact of our energy decisions as a direct financial value in our models.
EP: Rooftop solar may be an option for a big-box retailer but not necessarily for a similarly-sized data center. Why is this?
A. The simple answer is energy density. A typical data center consumes significantly more energy (10-20 times) per square foot than a similarly-sized retail store. Over our global footprint, we may consume a similar amount of total energy as the big-box retailer, but we do so over fewer, more energy dense, facilities. Consequently, an application like rooftop solar, with relatively low energy production density, is not a great fit for data centers. The economics of rooftop applications are obviously no different for a data center and a retail store, it just comes down to a question of whether the total energy production from the system is material relative to the total load of the facility. That is not to say that there is not a place for data centers and solar, it’s just that we have greater interest in larger utility-scale applications.
EP: What aspects of the classic central-station-transmission-grid system pose the most challenges for a company like Microsoft?
A. We run mission critical operations, so we are of course concerned about aging T&D infrastructure and the need for investment in technology to improve grid stability. We are also highly concerned about generation adequacy issues. We need to see intelligent market design and regulation that ensures the development of new generation capacity when and where it is needed. That includes policies that support the development of distributed generation that can serve as cost effective capacity and energy resources.
EP: What primary message do you plan to convey during the keynote session at ELECTRIC POWER?
A. We look at data as a refined form of energy. So we don’t just think about our energy from the perspective of a consumer, rather we think about where we sit in the overall energy supply chain and about how to create more efficient energy systems, from the power plant to chip. As a result, our path for delivering power to supply Microsoft's cloud infrastructure is focused both on how we optimize for efficiency inside our footprint, but also how we integrate and invest in driving greater efficiencies across the broader energy supply chain. We have three overarching objectives that drive us in this effort:
• First, distribute efficient power generation to the datacenter that integrates with the capacity and energy needs of the local grid.
• Second, deliver to the grid low-cost and efficient energy through participation in utility-scale generation projects.
• Third, foster the development of the next generation of energy technologies that will make future distributed and grid-connected projects radically more efficient.
We don’t expect to achieve any of this on our own, instead we look to the energy industry to partner with us on achieving these objectives.
To hear more from Brian Janous and other industry experts, register for ELECTRIC POWER 2014 right now!
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