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In 2015, a Greenpeace report, Clicking Green: Building a Green Internet, noted Amazon’s earlier commitments but said, “Despite these potentially significant shifts, the continued lack of transparency on the energy performance of the AWS cloud, combined with significant expansion of its infrastructure in utility territories that have little to no renewable energy capacity, would appear to indicate that AWS has not yet determined how it is going to make its commitment to renewable energy become real.”
The group greeted Amazon’s latest announcement with cautious optimism.
“Amazon’s solar deal in Virginia is an encouraging sign that the company is making progress on its pledge to power its data centers with 100 percent renewable energy, and is welcome news for Amazon’s customers that have urged the company to move faster in its adoption of renewable energy,” said Greenpeace senior campaigner David Pomerantz. “But Amazon customers still need better transparency to properly assess the significance of this solar deal. Amazon has not disclosed how much energy its data centers consume in Virginia or anywhere else. While this new deal is significant, it appears to provide only a small fraction of the electricity Amazon is consuming in Virginia, where it is growing rapidly.”
Just prior to Amazon’s announcement, Green America unveiled its Amazon: Build a Greener Cloud campaign to push the company faster on clean energy and increased transparency of its energy use.
“Amazon lags behind its competitors in using renewable energy for its cloud-based computer servers,” said Green America’s executive co-director Todd Larsen. “Unlike most of its competitors, it fails to publish a corporate responsibility or sustainability reporting, and it fails to disclose its emissions and impacts to the Carbon Disclosure Project. We are calling on Amazon.com to take steps to be transparent about its emissions and to rapidly move to renewable energy.”
Amazon is following a number of companies which have moved to power their data centers with clean, renewable energy. Microsoft, Apple and Google are among the companies which have created partnerships for wind and solar farms. Apple has been a green energy leader, saying that all its data centers now run on renewables and earning a top score in Greenpeace’s Clicking Green report. It announced a partnership earlier this year to build a huge new solar farm in California.
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