Tech Giants Must Buy More New Energy – Greenpeace

Is Amazon breaking 100% renewables commitment? Greenpeace report says yes

Michelle Froese, February 13, 2019 (Windpower Engineering and Development)

“…Amazon Web Services, already one of the largest electricity customers in the [Virginia], appears to have abandoned its commitment to renewable energy, with evidence of a dramatic expansion in Virginia over the past two years without any additional supply of renewable energy [according to Clicking Clean Virginia – The Dirty Energy Powering Data Center Alley…[Unless Amazon and other cloud computing giants stop further fueling climate change with new demand for dirty energy, the] growing use of the internet could lead to more pipelines, more pollution and more problems…[About 70% of the world’s internet traffic passes through Northern Virginia’s ‘data center alley,’ the largest data center hub in the world]…

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Of the data center operators included in the analysis, Facebook has achieved 37% renewables in Virginia, Microsoft 34%, while Google and Digital Realty are at 4% renewables. Apple and Salesforce do not own data centers in Virginia, but have offset 100 and 44% of their colocation leases with renewables, respectively. Amazon’s data centers in Virginia are powered by only 12% renewable energy…[Total power demand of existing data centers and those under development in Virginia is] approaching 4.5 GW…[Amazon Web Services has] 1.7 GW of power demand across 55 Virginia data centers operating or under construction, representing an increase of nearly 60% in the past two years alone… Facebook, Microsoft, and Google all operate or are building their own data centers in the Commonwealth and have not matched this demand with local renewables…” click here for more

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