As a company committed to addressing the climate crisis, Amazon is on a path to powering its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025 – five years earlier than its original 2030 goal. This is part of The Climate Pledge, which Amazon co-founded with the objective of achieving net-zero carbon within its operations before 2040. To help achieve this goal, Amazon started to roll out the first of its utility-scale projects to deliver clean energy to grids across Europe in 2019.
Amazon projects are already delivering renewable energy to the grid in Sweden, Ireland, and Spain.
Amazon’s first operational wind farm outside of the United States is 91 megawatts (MW) and came online in 2020 in Bäckhammar, in Western Sweden. The wind farm will bring capacity to the Swedish grid equivalent to the power consumed by 29,000 average Swedish homes per year. This will support the company’s operations in the country, including data centres, fulfilment centres, offices or vehicle fleets.
Also in 2020, in County Cork, Ireland, Amazon delivered the country’s first-ever unsubsidised wind farm to the electricity grid. The wind farm will deliver enough renewable energy to power 17,000 Irish homes per year. It will contribute to reducing annual carbon emissions in the country by 32,000 tonnes of CO2. This is the first of three utility-scale projects by Amazon in Ireland and will be key to the country reaching its renewable energy targets by 2030 as part of its Climate Action Plan.
The Alcalá de Guadaira solar project also came online in 2020 and is one of the largest and most powerful renewable energy projects in Spain. It comprises four 50 MW photovoltaic solar plants, will provide enough energy to power almost 145,000 Spanish households per year, and will contribute to reducing CO2 emissions by 300 metric kilotons per year. Amazon’s power purchase agreement with the project is for 149 MW of energy, or the equivalent of 30,000 homes per year. The energy from the project will be used both for Amazon’s logistics network in Spain and for its data centres.
Amazon becomes Europe’s largest corporate buyer of renewable energy
In 2020, Amazon became the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world, having invested in 10,000 MW of renewable power. These projects supply renewable energy for fulfilment centres and AWS data centres that support millions of customers globally. On top of the three projects that have already begun delivering clean energy to Amazon’s European operations, there are 18 further utility-scale wind and solar projects set to come online in the coming years.
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