Microsoft Pays Employees to Cut their Carbon Footprint
August 12, 2008
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A company executive from Microsoft said at a recent conference that the company has brought in measures to incentivize employees to reduce energy use at its data centre to help cut the company’s carbon footprint.
While Microsoft emphasizes that a lot of improvements can come from improved technology, a point they are trying to use to drive sales, the company recognizes that human behavior still has a role to play.
The bonuses for managers of their data centres are now tied to the energy efficiency of their facilities. In an effort to cut their carbon footprint, one manager actually cleaned off the roof of the building to improve heat reflection and reduce the pressure on the cooling systems. This had enough of an impact that it is now standard practice at all data centers.
Another example of the changing incentive structure is that different business units now pay for the energy used by their servers. Business units were previously charged based on the floor space of their servers, which led to stacking of several servers, a practice that caused increased heat and required more energy to keep the systems cool.
These incentives seem to be having the desired impact on the company’s carbon footprint. Energy efficiency at their data centres improved 22% from 2004 to 2007
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