Microsoft Corp. said this week it’s planning to open in Sweden next year what it says will be one of the most advanced and sustainable data center locations it has ever built.

The company said the new region, which consists of data centers in Gävle Sandviken and Staffanstorp, will help it to achieve its longstanding goal of using 100% renewable energy sources in all of its buildings and data centers by 2025. It will also help Microsoft to be more transparent about its energy consumption, thanks to a new service it has developed in a partnership with the Swedish energy firm Vattenfall AB.

Microsoft Cloud Corporate Vice President Noelle Walsh said in a blog post Tuesday that the companies have created what they call a “24/7 matching solution” that helps to match energy consumption with renewable energy sources more accurately.

Walsh explained that Microsoft achieves its sustainability goals by purchasing certificates called “Guarantees of Origin.” They’re essentially blocks, or specific amounts, of renewable energy that are calculated based on the average annual electricity consumption of each of the specific buildings it pertains to.

But this way of purchasing renewable energy isn’t totally reliable, since it doesn’t account for any variations in demand over short time periods. So, if during the course of the day the sun isn’t shining enough, there might be times when one of Microsoft’s facilities still needs to draw on energy from a more traditional sources.

Walsh said that’s a problem, because it means Microsoft has no way of knowing the exact source of its energy consumption on an hourly basis.

“While we have seen remarkable progress toward renewable sourcing and commitments, there is a fundamental flaw in monitoring the source and quantity of energy consumed,” she said. “And without the transparency of supply and demand, market forces cannot work to ensure that renewable energy demand is supplied from renewable sources.”

Microsoft therefore decided to work with Vattenfall to improve transparency around this, and the two companies together built a system that relies on “internet of things” devices that help to tally power consumption with renewable energy generation. The Vattenfall 24/7 matching solution works by measuring the amount of energy produced by a building’s renewable energy sources each hour, while also accurately gauging the level of power consumption onsite using smart meters.

Walsh said the Vattenfall 24/7 Matching solution has been trialed for the past year in both Microsoft and Vattenfall’s Swedish headquarters, and the results have been so encouraging that it’s now being made generally available for other companies to use.

“The Vattenfall 24/7 Matching solution enables us to have a more accurate picture of energy used to match with Guarantees of Origin (GOs),” she said. “This marks another important step in our commitment to be carbon negative by 2030 and use 100% renewable energy by 2025.”

Microsoft’s new region in Sweden, which will power cloud services such as Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure and Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, will be the first to use the Vattenfall 24/7 Matching service day to day. It will help the company to try to achieve its commitment of using 100% renewable energy each hour, rather than relying on yearly averages.

The data center also boasts what Microsoft calls a “circular center,” which helps to reduce “e-waste” from servers and other hardware. It’s basically a kind of recycling center that uses machine learning to help understand which bits of hardware can be reused. Walsh said it will help Microsoft to repurpose as much as 90% of the components used in its data centers by 2025.

Image: Microsoft