Monitor and reduce carbon emissions (CO2) in Azure

In Microsoft Azure, we have some options to monitor and reduce your organizations Carbon emissions (CO2) from services hosted in the cloud. When hosting servers on-premises, they need power, cooling and networking and those are also needed in the cloud. By migrating servers to the cloud doesn’t mean that those emissions do not count. Those emissions are generated on an other location.

In this guide, I will show some features of Microsoft Azure regarding monitoring and reducing carbon emissions.

Table of Contents

• Carbon Optimization dashboard
• Emissions details
• Emissions Reductions and advices
• Types/Scopes of emissions
• Emissions Azure vs on-premises
• Summary

Carbon Optimization dashboard

Azure offers several Carbon Optimization options to help organizations to monitor and reduce their CO₂ emissions and operate more sustainable. You can find this in the Azure Portal by searching for “Carbon optimizations”:

At this dashboard we can find some interesting information, like the total emissions from when your organization started using Azure services, emissions in the last month and the potential reductions that your organization can make.

Emissions details

On the Emissions details pane we can find some more detailed information, like what type and resources contributed to the emissions:

Here we have an overview of an Azure environment with 5 servers, a storage account including backup. You see that the virtual machine on top is the biggest factor of the emissions each month. This has the most impact on the datacenters of Microsoft in terms of computing power. The storage account takes the 2nd place, because of all the redundant options configured there (GRS).

We can also search per type of resources, which makes the overview a lot better and summarized:

Emissions Reductions and advices

The “Emissions Reductions” detail pane contains advices about how to reduce emissions in your exact environment:

In my environment I have only 1 recommendation, and that is to downgrade one of the servers that has more resources than it needs. However, we have to stick to system requirements of an specific application that needs those resources at minimum.

Types/Scopes of emissions

To understand more about generic Carbon emission calculating, I will add a simple clarification.

Carbon emissions for organizations are mostly calculated in those 3 scopes:

Scope	Type of Emissions	Sources	Example
Scope 1	Direct emissions	Company-owned sources	Company vehicles, on-site fuel combustion, refrigerant leaks
Scope 2	Indirect emissions from purchased energy	Electricity, heating, cooling	Powering offices, data centers, factories
Scope 3	Indirect emissions from the value chain	Upstream (suppliers) and downstream (customers)	Supply chain, product use, business travel, employee commuting

Like shown in the table, cloud computing will be mostly calculated as Scope 3 emissions, because of external emissions and not internal. On-premises computing will be mostly calculated as Scope 2. As you already saw, the scopes count for the audited company. This means that Scope 3 emissions of an Microsoft customer may be Scope 2 emissions for Microsoft itself.

Emissions Azure vs on-premises

While we can use the Azure cloud to host our environment, hosting on-premises is still an option too. However, hosting those servers yourself means a lot of recurring costs for;

• Hardware
• Energy costs
• Maintenance
• Cooling
• Employee training
• Reserve hardware
• Licenses

An added factor is that energy to power those on-premises servers are mostly done with “grey” energy. Microsoft Azure guarantees a minimum of 50% of his energy is from renewable sources like solar, wind, and hydro. By the end of 2025, Microsoft strives to reach the 100% goal. This can make hosting your infrastructure on Azure 100% emissions free.

Summary

While this page may not be that technical and interesting for you and your company, for some companies this can be interesting information.

However, Microsoft does not recommend using these numbers in any form of marketing campaigns and to only use as internal references.

Thank you for reading this guide and I hope it was interesting.

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