Case Study: Smart Spaces (Smart Buildings)
Microsoft Leapfrogs Energy Innovation
How is a Tech Giant paving the way to a clean energy future?
With intelligent building management capabilities that reduces CO₂ emission by ~42 tonnes annually.
Microsoft accelerates energy breakthrough ambitions.
About Microsoft.
Microsoft is one of the largest multinational tech company in the world, with headquarters in Washington USA, operations and subsidiaries in >120 countries, and >168,000 employees worldwide. It develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services.
Microsoft enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. The company believes technology can and should be a force for good and that meaningful innovation can and will contribute to a brighter world in big and small ways.
Microsoft’s Challenge.
Microsoft is committed to being carbon negative by 2030.
To that end, Microsoft aims to continuously reduce its buildings’ energy consumption by 2% each year. It is also targeting to improve employees’ electric vehicle (EV) charging experience and office environment quality, as part of an initiative to encourage EV usage to reduce carbon emissions. To meet these objectives, Microsoft knew it needed innovative technologies and smart building solutions, in additional to its own innovative capabilities.
What Microsoft Achieved.
Envision Digital fast-tracked Microsoft’s net zero goals.
Attain single source of truth across geographically distant campuses.
Envision Digital implemented a smart building solution built on EnOS™ AIoT platform across 5 Microsoft campuses in China and Hong Kong. The IoT platform integrated disparate assets such as smart meters, building management systems, energy storage systems, EV charging stations, HVAC, solar PVs, and indoor environmental quality sensors. It allowed centralized data management across geographically distant locations.
Optimize building comfort and energy consumption.
Building on the same set of data, Envision Digital developed an intelligent indoor environmental quality management system with Digital Twin technology. This provided indoor air quality condition analysis, thermal comfort analysis and automated device alerts. As a result, Microsoft can optimize the balance between building comfort and energy consumption.
Improve EV charging with connected energy management system.
This connected energy management system analyzes data, via artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics, to identify opportunities for energy arbitrage, and improve EV charging experience.
Scalable energy management system minimizes additional investment.
With Envision Digital’s scalable and adaptable hardware installation, Microsoft’s distributed energy storage systems is now more flexible and resilient. The company can install additional charging stations without additional investments in transformer capacity, reducing costs and barriers to transformation.