Microsoft makes carbon neutral pledge

Microsoft has made a pledge that by July 1, 2012, the start of it's new fiscal year, that it's direct operations including it's data center and software development labs and possibly other operations will be carbon neutral. Along with this committment Microsoft plans to create an internal carbon fee that will be applied across it's operations.  This means that there will be a chargeback for the energy used by the operations so they'll be highly encouraged to reduce their carbon footprint.

This is significant since Microsoft is currently going through a transformation.  In the past they relied heavily on software licensing and sales for products such as Windows and Office.  In the future they are expected to be more heavily invested in cloud operations and data centers.  Cloud computing has the opportunity to be more green since computing power is more centralized but at the same time data centers can use a lot of power and also produce a lot of heat so they require a lot of cooling.  

Microsoft has been doing a lot lately to be a more green company.  On the EPA's recent list of the biggest purchasers of green power Microsoft is number 3.  Companies such as Google, Apple, and Facebook are adding data centers.  Apple is working hard to be more green as they build new data centers.  For example they recently built a new data center in North Carolina that will have a solar farm to supply power and they are also building a data center in Oregon that is rumored to use biomass to provide green energy. 

One of the great things about Microsoft's committment is it's likely that other high-tech companies will implement similar carbon neutral plans.