Executive Summary
"We don’t want to debate climate change. We want to stop it."
- Apple (2015)
"Every year we strive to outdo ourselves in operating sustainably."
- Adobe (2013)
"We leverage our unique assets and role in the global marketplace to influence Earth-positive impacts along the commerce value chain."
- EBay (2015)
Context and project goals
When it comes to innovation in energy and building performance, one can expect leading-edge activity from the technology sector. As front-line innovators in design, materials science, and information management, developing and operating high-performance buildings is a natural extension of their core business.
The energy choices made by technology companies have broad importance given their influence on society at large as well as the extent of their own energy footprint. Microsoft, for example, has approximately 250 facilities (30 million square feet of floor area) around the world, with significant aggregate energy use of approximately 4 million kilowatt-hours per day (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Microsoft’s global energy footprint.
There is a degree of existing documentation of efforts to design, build, and operate facilities in the technology sector. However, the material is fragmented and typically looks only at a single company, or discrete projects within a company. Corporate social responsibility reports provide a useful overview of goals and initiatives. Databases of LEED and Energy Star buildings provide insight into the outcomes for individual buildings. Various news and trade press reports occasionally fill in missing details. Yet, there is no single resource for corporate planners and decision makers that takes stock of the opportunities and documents sector-specific case studies in a structured manner.
This report seeks to fill that gap, doing so through a combination of generalized technology assessments (“Key Strategies”) and case studies (“Flagship Projects”).
The technology sector is making up for lost time when it comes to high-performance buildings and infrastructure
According to industry observers and the companies’ own statements, many tech firms are only recently hitting their stride when it comes to managing energy use and carbon emissions. This may in part be a reflection of the industry’s posture towards facility design and master-planning more generally. According to David Radcliffe, Google’s VP of real estate development:
“Tech really hasn’t adopted a particular language for buildings. I mean, we’ve just found old buildings, and we’ve moved into them, and made do best we could.”
The primary source of information on the industry’s progress is through voluntary information-gathering initiatives such as the Carbon Disclosure Project, CDP. Historically, the information technology sector had lagged most others in terms of emissions reductions, progress towards targets, and related disclosures (PwC 2011). While data centers readily come to mind as the driving force behind the technology sector’s carbon footprint, reports from the leaders in this space suggest that about one quarter of potential savings and one-third of energy cost savings are found not in servers but in buildings (Figure 2). Microsoft reports that nearly 40% of its entire corporate carbon footprint (including business travel) is attributed to its buildings (Accenture 2011). In contrast, Facebook reports that 96% of its energy use is in data centers. Ebay estimates that about 26% of its carbon footprint is attributable to its office buildings, and 50% to its data centers, and 16% to warehouses.
While not always first-movers, tech companies have engaged in significant efforts to manage energy use in their buildings. For example, building on efforts begun in 2006, 70% of Adobe’s floorspace has been LEED certified.
Figure 2. Energy efficiency gains captured within the
Information Technology sector by the 30 leading
CDP responders. “Energy efficiency processes”
are assumed to be primarily data centers.
Carbon-neutrality has also become a widespread goal in the technology sector. While companies have made significant strides by reducing energy use, they have also in many cases made up the difference by purchasing third-party carbon offsets. Tech companies such as Adobe and Google have fully offset all emissions by combining on- and off-site approaches; Apple is close behind already having done so in its US operations. Many of the companies have pursued a broader array of sustainability objectives (water, materials, waste, etc.), including focus on supply chains "upstream" from their customer-facing operations.
Pulse of the Industry: Evidence from Carbon Disclosure Project Reporting
The global Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) deploys an annual survey to over 5000 of the world’s largest companies on behalf of approximately 767 institutional investors (asset managers, asset owners, banks, insurers, and others) representing $90 trillion under management as of 2014, or one-third of the world’s invested capital. This voluntary survey seeks information on respondents’ perceived risks and opportunities associated with climate change, energy use and carbon footprint, and investments and progress in reducing emissions. The results are compiled, analyzed, and communicated to the marketplace.Approximately 40% of companies opted to respond to the latest survey (2014). Facebook is the only company among our case studies that receives invitations but has not as of the latest CDP cycle responded.
The CDP’s “Climate Performance Leadership Index” (CPLI) represents the extent of corporate awareness of the issues, efficacy of efforts manage climate risks and opportunities, and progress towards targets (CDP 2015). The latest CPLI includes four of the eight companies for which we have developed case studies--Adobe, Apple, and Google (and Infosys was on the 2013 list).
Figure 3 shows the 30 highest-rating IT industry respondents to the CDP. The index represents the extent of corporate awareness of the issues, efficacy of efforts manage climate risks and opportunities, and progress towards targets. Across all sectors, approximately 10% of responding companies attain inclusion in the index (the value for the technology sector is not known).
Figure 3. Excerpt from Carbon Disclosure Project
listing 30 companies comprising the
“Climate Performance Leadership Index”
within the IT sector.
Corporate campuses are integral elements of broader urban systems
Technology company facilities are tightly connected with the surrounding urban infrastructure. However, facility developers and operators have historically tended to focus more inwards than outwards, making only limited efforts to optimize the broader connections. This dynamic is rapidly changing.
The scale of some of the technology industry’s projects creates a potentially constructive tension regarding the owner’s needs and its relationship to the broader urban system in which its operations are nested. In perhaps the most prominent example of this, Apple is investing in community-scale energy as well as recycled water infrastructure (Love 2015) to help run their proposed expanded facilities by contributing to upstream capital projects that serve the larger community. Apple and First Solar announced in early 2015 that they are paying $848 million for 25 years of the output of a 130 MW block of First Solar's California Flats project in Southeast Monterey County. In the same vein, Google has invested $1.8 billion to date in solar and wind energy infrastructure projects. Many corporate campuses are seeking to reduce the overall building footprint while increasing vegetated and porous surfaces while better managing runoff. In its Hyderabad campus, Infosys states that such efforts have actually helped to raise the underlying water table.
In another example of community-scale considerations, at Ebay's Draper UT Customer Service Center LED parking lighting was used with peer-to-peer controls, reducing light pollution and meeting Dark-Sky Society standards for light pollution.
Key strategies can be implemented at all scales
There are a wide array of key strategies for achieving increased building performance. At the highest level these break down into the broad domains of energy demand, energy supply, and indoor environment. Once energy efficiency is maximized, renewable energy resources can then be cost-effectively marshaled to serve the remaining energy needs. Supply and demand necessarily interact, not only with respect to the provision of on-site heat and power, but also in the ability of buildings to communicate and interact with the electric grid in which they are nested. Indoor environment is a cross-cutting consideration, and one that is closely tied with tech companies' goals for creating desirable work environments to help attract and retain talent.
We identify twelve broad areas of focus (Table 1) including discrete demand-side technologies, integrated systems (assemblages of technologies and their controls) at the individual building level, and multi-building or campus-level perspective where resources are shared or otherwise interact. Within these areas, we have delineated 61 established best practices and 70 emerging opportunities. Key attributes for many of these are delineated in Table 2. These attributes include market readiness, ROI, energy savings potential, water savings, acoustics, maintenance implications, influence on quality of indoor environment, and institutional considerations.
Table 1. Distillation of Key Strategies considered in the report.
Flagship projects demonstrate key strategies in practice
To complement the wide-ranging "generic" discussion of best practices and emerging technologies that are raising the bar, we have assembled real-world profiles of eight leading technology companies. These begin with brief overviews of enterprise-wide goals and initiatives, and then focus on a single “Flagship Project” to illustrate specific implementations of key strategies.
These companies represent a combined workforce of about 400,000 people, 860 locations, and over 50 million square feet of floorspace. The specific flagship projects we have described represent 36 buildings and 9 million square feet of floor area. The profiled companies and the highlighted Flagship Projects are shown in Figure 4. Table 3 summarizes and provides a side-by-side comparison of the projects.
Figure 4. Flagship projects, interactive map here.
The flagship case studies vary in nature. Some (Apple, Ebay, Genentech, and Infosys) are new construction, while others (Adobe, Facebook, and Google) are retrofit. The Genentech new-construction case delves into the underlying design process, illustrating how setting specific performance goals helped to steer an iterative design process driven very strongly by a desire to maximize energy performance and workplace environmental quality, informed by the latest energy research and testing facilities and verifying predicted performance with measured data. In some cases (particularly Ebay and Google), relatively little information was available in the public domain. The Apple case illustrates how the development of particularly large projects has compelled the developer to partner with other entities to increase "upstream" water and energy resources, in this case recycled water infrastructure and central PV power stations. Infosys is the only case that provides publicly available post-occupancy evaluation, and the results showed significantly higher occupant comfort and satisfaction with the greener building than with an otherwise identical comparison building.
While these companies also own and operate data centers and manufacturing facilities, the focus here is on corporate spaces. We also note examples of how the companies have made efforts to improve the efficiency of water use and to provide more environmentally friendly transportation options for employees.
One somewhat surprising observation is that the companies have made only modest efforts to have their buildings formally rated. Apple has not obtained Energy Star ratings for any of their buildings (per the official database). While all have some LEED-rated buildings it is a small number in most cases and only one of the selected flagship projects is LEED-rated. There is also little evidence of systematic in-house benchmarking practices.
These projects achieved very significant resource reduction goals. Energy use was reduced from 30% to 44%, and water was reduced by 50% to 76%. Most aspired to achieve zero net carbon emissions through a combination of on-site efficiencies and renewables and the purchase of off-site clean power or carbon credits. No doubt reflective of the view of many companies, Google has clearly stated that one of the prime drivers of its aggressive push towards renewables is the hedging value offered against future fossil-fuel price spikes.
Institutional Considerations: Buildings are places where people work and innovate
While manufacturing and data-processing facilities may represent the majority of a tech company’s total energy footprint, the driving innovations and productivity trace to the people who occupy the built environment.
Technology companies see these as important factors in attracting and retaining a talented, motivated workforce. With this in mind, technology companies are paying close attention to indoor environmental considerations in their facilities. Our analysis finds that high-performance buildings can yield two-fold benefits in terms of energy and operating cost savings as well as improved occupant satisfaction. A concrete example includes improved occupant comfort in radiantly-cooled spaces (Infosys) and ability to avoid costs and business disruptions by proactively addressing risks associated with poorly commissioned control systems.
Building occupants and managers must be motivated to help achieve sustainability goals. It is notable that some technology companies--Infosys among our case study examples--actually link renumeration to measured progress towards sustainability performance.
A key institutional innovation strategy is that the performance of each new building should be a significant improvement on that of its immediate predecessor - a process of learning from each new building. Only Infosys seems to have formalized this practice.
Green, Clean, and Mean – Stretch Goals for the Future
The technology industry has broadly demonstrated an ability to mobilize existing technology to achieve net-zero large energy facilities and campuses. The partial reliance on purchasing carbon credits is diminishing as more aggressive levels of energy efficiency are obtained and larger dedicated renewable systems are implemented. A new generation of emerging energy-efficiency strategies—at the level of individual buildings as well as campus scales—presents another level of savings potential.
Not all challenges are technological. For example, Adobe, Ebay, and Facebook are among the few tech companies participating in a new 25-company initiative championed by the World Wildlife Fund and World Resources Institute to promote Corporate Renewable Energy Buyer's Principles, setting aggressive renewable energy goals, addressing barriers, and collaborating to drive change in policy.
While this report represents the most exhaustive effort to date to compile the experience and remaining opportunities for buildings in the technology sector, much information remains outside the public domain. LEED scorecards hold some of the more detailed information we could locate, but this is relatively high-level, with the underlying reports remaining proprietary. A strong movement among technology companies to track and publicly disclose the energy intensities of data centers (see opencompute.org) has not yet been matched by similar efforts focused on office environments. More effort in this regard can be expected, compelled in part due to local and regional disclosure ordinances, as well as the increasing trend towards corporate social responsibility reporting.
The performance and well being of building occupants is recognized to be a prime driver for seeking high-performance buildings. However, we have found little rigorous evaluation of these desired outcomes. Better data acquisition and evaluation based on measurable metrics, coupled with increasing awareness of the linkages between building performance and occupant performance are likely to spur renewed efforts in this area.
The mobilization of more and better information will also be facilitated by steadily improvements in data-acquisition and analysis platforms (Accenture 2011), and more sophistication in terms of bringing a risk-management perspective to the energy management process in order to ensure performance and persistence of energy savings, in tandem with work environment that is maximally conducive to productivity and innovation.
References
Adobe. 2013. Corporate Responsibility Report.
Apple, Inc. 2015. Environmental Responsibility Report, Covering FY14. http://images.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Responsibility_Report_2015.pdf
CDP. 2015. “The A List: The CDP Climate Performance Leadership Index 2014.” 44pp.
eBay. 2015. "Enabling Greener Commerce". http://www.ebayinc.com/social-innovation/enabling-greener-commerce
Love, J. 2015. “Apple Campus 2: Massive Recycled Water Project Approved.” San Jose Mercury News.http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_27778101/water-district-board-consider-recycled-water-apple-campus
PwC. 2011. “Information Technology Sector Report: Covering Global 500, S&P 500, and FTSE 250 Respondents.” Prepared by PriceWaterhouseCoopers on behalf of the Carbon Disclosure Project. 5pp.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS & DISCLAIMERS
This work was supported by Microsoft, through the Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Office of Building Technology, State and Community Programs, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.
This document was prepared as an account of work sponsored by the United States Government. While this document is believed to contain correct information, neither the United States Government nor any agency thereof, nor the Regents of the University of California, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by its trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government or any agency thereof, or the Regents of the University of California. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof or the Regents of the University of California.