Data-driven tweaks to corporate facilities can save millions
of dollars in energy costs, and Microsoft hopes its own smart-campus software
will help lead the way. That's the gist of an epic, 3,300-word multimedia
feature posted today on the Microsoft News Center, which traces the evolution
of Microsoft 's campus from 88 acres of grass and forest in bucolic, Redmond, WA, to the 500-acre,
125-building headquarters it became. Over the past several months, a team of
engineers stitched together 30,000 sensors across the campus to report on
everything from the ideal time to turn lights on and off to the "hugely
inefficient [...] battles being waged between air conditioners and
heaters." The result, the company says, is a system that applies big data
to the "Internet of Things" in pursuit of significant cost and energy
savings.
Make no mistake, this is a press release —
Microsoft mentions but does not name three "vendors" who worked with
its engineers to design the software needed to run its facilities program. But
the story does point toward a growing interest in reducing the energy consumed
by commercial buildings, which Microsoft says account for 40 percent of the
world's energy consumption. For now, the project is mostly helping to reduce
Microsoft's expenses. But as it starts selling smart-campus software and
services to other companies and institutions, it could become a moneymaker.
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