Samuel OskysJeff Bezos recently joined the Climate Pledge which was announced in September of 2019. This is a commitment to meet the Paris Agreement 10 years early and Amazon is the first to the signatory of this pledge. This program requires signatories to be net-zero carbon across their businesses by the year 2040.
With the latest projects being uncovered, Amazon enters a new milestone in the energy space. Amazon will set up solar farms in US states North Carolina and Virginia that will generate 215 megawatts of power in total, and in Scotland, they will have a wind farm that will generate 50 megawatts of power.
Once complete, the three new projects will provide 265 MW of renewable energy via wind and solar power. All three of the projects are expected to become active in 2021 and will supply energy to Amazon Web Services data centers, which power Amazon and millions of AWS customers globally.
Energy projects are not new to Amazon, the company has already launched 18 utility-scale wind and solar renewable energy projects that will generate over 1,600 MW of renewable capacity and deliver more than 4.6 million MWh of clean energy annually.
The company has also installed over 50 solar rooftops on amazon buildings that generate 130,000 MWh of clean energy annually.
Kara Hurst, Director of Sustainability in Amazon commented:
In addition to the environmental benefits inherently associated with running applications in the cloud, Amazon is committed to minimizing our carbon emissions and reaching 80% renewable energy use across the company by 2024. We’ve announced eight projects this year and have more projects on the horizon – and we’re committed to investing in renewable energy as a critical step toward addressing our carbon footprint globally.
Adding,
With nearly 70 renewable energy projects around the globe – including 54 solar rooftops – we are making significant progress towards reaching Amazon’s company-wide commitment to reach 100% renewable energy by 2030.
That’s more than the 40% renewable energy that Amazon uses today. The e-commerce behemoth joins big business names who are implementing changes to use green energy, recently Google invested $2bn in global renewable energy.
