Amazon for three years has ranked as the No. 1 corporate purchaser of renewable energy worldwide. As the retail, cloud and entertainment giant strives to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2040, most of its carbon cuts so far have come from its shift to renewables.
“Renewable energy is the place where you have a big impact on our carbon footprint today,” said Charley Daitch, the Amazon Web Services director of energy and water strategy. “And we moved in a really meaningful way to do that.”
Amazon has invested primarily in wind and solar projects, amassing a capacity of 20 gigawatts of power; by comparison, California, which leads the nation in solar, has a capacity of 22 GW for those two renewables. Amazon’s portfolio includes more than 165 solar and wind farms, plus 237 smaller-scale rooftop solar installations.
To reach its near-term goal of powering all operations with renewable electricity by 2025, Amazon is using its corporate heft to make inroads in states and countries dominated by fossil fuels and is applying its tech expertise to build AWS-based software to more efficiently manage its power operations.
But with the achievements, it has also drawn criticism in the Pacific Northwest where watchdogs revealed that Amazon is investing in natural gas and lobbied against data center clean energy regulations that ultimately failed.
Amazon’s experience reveals the sizable and relatively quick progress that a corporation can make in greening its electricity use, and it’s helping pave the way for others. But the Seattle company’s efforts also highlight the significant structural and political challenges that must be overcome if businesses and governments are to cut carbon emissions as quickly and dramatically as the world needs.
“The only way we solve this crisis is for smart people to bring really good ideas and be willing to scale them really quickly,” Daitch said. “At Amazon, we’re able to do both.”
Other tech giants are likewise investing in carbon-free energy. Microsoft also has a 2025 all-renewables goal, and Google has already reached that target. The two companies are additionally pursuing 24/7 clean energy, which means adding power sources that can operate around-the-clock — which wind and solar cannot. Amazon is charting a different course, dubbed “carbon matching,” that prioritizes renewable energy projects in areas with dirtier grids.
Daitch leads the majority of Amazon’s renewable energy efforts, which mostly reside within AWS given the division’s outsized demand for clean power for its data centers. GeekWire recently caught up with Daitch to discuss the company’s energy strategies. Questions and answers from our conversation were edited for clarity and length.
GeekWire: These projects help Amazon meet its goals for carbon reductions, but what are the bigger impacts, the ripple effects of these projects?
Charlie Daitch: In the last year or two, we’ve been doing more and more renewable projects in places like South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, and those are places where there is no off-the-shelf path for large corporates to do renewables. South Africa is a good example where we had to go and talk to Eskom, the state-owned utility, [and] the Ministry of Energy, and actually change some of the tariffs to allow us to contract the solar energy and then bring that over to our data centers.
Once we set up the regulations and change them, that’s open for other corporates and other companies as well. It then becomes available for everybody else.
You faced criticism in Oregon with your plans to use natural gas fuel cells to power your data centers and plans to build natural gas pipelines to carry the fuel. There are concerns about Amazon’s lobbying in the state against legislation related to renewable energy rules. What are your thoughts on what happened there?
We have a data center region in central Oregon. The Pacific Northwest is not part of an organized energy market like the rest of the country. So the [grid] transmission that gets engineered and built here is different, and it’s less efficient and it’s slower. So what we’re facing in Oregon is delayed transmission build-out.
We’re going to power a very small part of our operations with fuel cells as a short-term bridge. It’s not part of our core strategy. The fuel cells will run on natural gas initially, but we’re actively working at Amazon as a whole to help encourage and facilitate more green hydrogen, which will provide a carbon-free fuel source [and could power the fuel cells].
We’ve agreed to do renewable energy projects in Oregon, but they’re just not available to us yet. So our opposition to the bill wasn’t around a philosophical disagreement [opposing regulations for data centers], it was more about how do we get there. And we want to work with legislators in Oregon in partnership to put together legislation that will really solve the problem.
You’ve got the goal of 100% renewable power by 2025, which is coming up quick. But with generative AI and large language models using more computational power, how do you factor that in?
It’s absolutely critical that we find new ways to bring on renewables and even larger scale. One of the big problems we’re facing around the country is the transmission grid. These places like Nebraska and Kansas and Wyoming, we have these incredible renewable resource areas — and a lack of transmission infrastructure to get that renewable energy to the load centers.
Part of what we’re doing at Amazon is participating in the regulatory filings with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. They’re not used to people like us — companies. I think they welcome our voice saying, “Hey, we see a big problem coming. Our growth is not going to stop, it’s going to continue — generative AI is going to be a driver of that — and we’re also not going to compromise on our clean energy goals.” Something’s got to change in the system.
How much are you exploring things like fission and fusion power, and maybe even geothermal? There’s all kinds of fringe technologies right now that may be front and center someday. How do you fold those into the mix?
We’ve really been all in on wind and solar. That’s the mature technology that’s going to get us there today.
But we also recognize that could change in the future, so we’re not committed to that. We’re certainly open to different technologies. We haven’t made any specific investments in the technologies you mentioned.
One area where we are investing more heavily is green hydrogen. The Climate Pledge Fund is a $2 billion fund to invest in clean energy startups that are going to help accelerate not just Amazon’s journey to net zero, but everybody’s. And the Climate Pledge Fund has a couple different investments in green hydrogen, both for transportation but also on the power grid as well.
