How Microsoft Plans to Bring Environmental Justice into Renewable Energy Procurement

In 2020, Microsoft committed to an ambitious goal of becoming carbon negative within 10 years, using methods that ensure often overlooked, vulnerable communities are afforded the clean-energy resources and economic opportunities they need.

As part of that broad vision, and with the help of WSP USA, Microsoft has developed an operative roadmap that aims to achieve these critical objectives.

Resulting from this collaboration are two key outputs: the “Environmental Justice in Renewable Energy Procurement” paper and the Environmental Justice Measurement and Evaluation Framework, a suite of resources collaboratively developed by the Just Transition PowerForce, Microsoft, WSP and Volt Energy, a national minority-owned solar development firm founded in 2020 that occupies a rare position in the energy sector — developing utility-scale projects that meet the clean energy, environmental and diversity goals of its clients.

Microsoft’s carbon negative plan is part of a wider corporate strategy that includes removing, by 2050, all carbon the company has emitted, either directly or by electrical consumption, since its founding in 1975.

A critical part of this strategy is an innovative and evolving approach to energy procurement through the use of power purchase agreements (PPAs) that prioritize economic inclusion within the supply chain and create new opportunities to strengthen and empower frontline populations, including those most impacted by environmental and climate-related risks and effects. The goal is to ensure that these vulnerable communities not only have access to needed resources for community-led clean energy and resilience initiatives, but also have an essential voice in the decision-making process, too.

Microsoft has vowed to annually publish its progress toward these and other goals to ensure their business practices continue to align the energy needs of its worldwide operations with the resourcing of community-led, clean energy and resilience projects.

Environmental justice is “the process and outcome by which all individuals are equitably protected from environmental risk, and equitably empowered to participate in the environmental decision-making processes,” as described in the Microsoft paper.

While WSP is a cited author in several of Microsoft’s papers, the primary reason the firm is on board for these projects is its experience in environmental justice and the green energy transition, according to Jenny Carney, WSP senior vice president of sustainability, energy and climate change and principal author for this paper.

Members of Carney’s team serve as strategic advisors and long-term implementation partners to many of the firm’s clients, including Microsoft. Since 2019, WSP has been working with the company on this framework that links its renewable energy strategy with its commitments to inclusion, diversity and racial equity. 

The project involved three years of collaboration to explore different models for renewable energy procurement and testing them with different partners. One of the key findings cited in the report is that corporate renewable energy commitments are spurring rapid growth in the development of needed infrastructure for the generation of renewable energy.

According to the report, in the U.S. alone, the scale of corporate renewable energy procurement from 2016 to 2020 resulted in PPAs from 21.78 gigawatts of new wind and solar developments. It says further that only one year later, record-setting growth in corporate PPAs added an additional 17 gigawatts of new power to the country’s energy pipeline.

“In a macro sense, our goal is to influence the world to approach clean energy transition in the best way possible,” said Carney, who was named nationally among 10 women incorporating environmental justice at work. “The added goal of sharing this type of information, within the context of a Microsoft paper, is that it enables other practitioners, who have less ability to resource innovation, to actually see how Microsoft is doing it.”

One reason Microsoft is committed to publicly sharing its progress, is a desire to serve in a global leadership role. By providing what they’ve learned, as well as critical implementation acumen and tools that can be leveraged by other organizations, they hope to inspire other organizations to take similar actions.

“Microsoft understands that it has the resources and potentiality for innovation that go well beyond what a normal corporation can do within the realm of sustainability,” Carney said.

“The hope is that, by sharing real information — not only about its process, but the need and opportunities, too — it will contribute to the collective good, enabling other corporate sustainability teams to effectively execute programs that can also achieve real results, both environmentally and socially,” she added.

WSP experts recognize the varying demands and opportunities each client faces with their sustainability and renewable energy commitments. In fact, while working with Microsoft, WSP also was assisting a major U.S. city with its renewable energy procurement.

“The challenge for cities is that they face a lot more pressure to ensure that their environmental commitments are driving tangible benefits locally, like job creation, cleaner air and economic inclusion,” Carney said. “Cities also have rote procurement processes that oftentimes don’t map well into non-commoditized services or approaches.”

In addition to that, while PPAs are the main mechanism for renewable energy procurement, most government entities only do one of those — or maybe, at most, a handful — every 15 years.

“There simply isn’t enough opportunity for them to gain any real expertise into how to go about them,” Carney said. “Compare that with large technology companies that have huge energy loads and large internal teams that are cranking out many of these power purchase deals annually. These are the companies that are learning about, and have a more sophisticated understanding of, the specifics of the renewable energy supply chain.”

She added that, while a lot of environmental justice advocates focus on work for cities or states, government bodies work with a much broader set of stakeholders and as a result have a slower, more cautious decision-making process.

One of the things mentioned in Microsoft’s framework is the rubric for evaluating community-led sustainability and resilience projects — the Environmental Justice Measurement and Evaluation Framework — for the extent to which they are optimized for environmental justice outcomes.

While WSP was working simultaneously with Microsoft and that major city, Carney said they were able to share a sort-of “friends and family” version of the rubric with the city team, naturally with the permission and approval of the corporate client, as city officials were defining different aspects of their program.

“I think an unheralded value of working with consultants is the extent to which they are the network that brings best practices into new places,” Carney said. “It helps different entities get around the obstacles that they're seeing, but don’t know how everyone else is dealing with it.”

The same could be said about Microsoft’s efforts to publicly share its work and detailed findings — including contracting excerpts — with the rest of the world.

The purpose of sharing information like this on a regular basis is to provide companies — as well as developers that are entering PPAs — with the insight they need to effectively apply an environmental justice lens to their renewable energy procurement strategy, so they can see how everyone else is doing it.