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Amazon claims to power all its operations with renewable energy. Yes, and I’m the Queen of Sheba.

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Greenpeace protesters at the site of Amazon’s HQ2 in Arlington, Virginia, in 2019 called out the company for failing to make progress towards its commitment to power the cloud with renewable energy. Since then, the company has actually increased its carbon emissions. Photo courtesy of Greenpeace.

When Amazon announced this month that it had achieved 100% renewable energy seven years ahead of schedule, that sounded like really good news for Virginia. Amazon owns more data centers here than anyone else, and data center energy demand is driving Dominion Energy Virginia’s plan to renege on its climate commitments, keep dirty coal plants online and build expensive new gas plants and transmission lines.  

Unfortunately, Amazon’s announcement is so full of asterisks it looks like a starry night. 

Let’s start with the good news. Amazon’s claim that it has purchased enough renewable energy to “match” its energy use is likely true, though its sustainability report doesn’t reveal essential details like how much energy the company uses. Amazon also says it is the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world, an impressive achievement. 

Some of that renewable energy is in Virginia, so it is reasonable to say it serves the company’s data centers here. A map on Amazon’s website shows the company has invested in 19 solar farms in Virginia, with a capacity that totals around 1,386 MW  – about a quarter of all solar installed in Virginiato date. That’s terrific. If every company operating in Virginia did as much, we’d be rolling in solar, figuratively speaking. 

So what am I complaining about? 

One problem is that the energy appetite of Amazon’s data centers in Virginia far outstrips the output of all of its solar farms here. The other problem is that producing renewable energy in the middle of the day can only very loosely be said to “match” energy used at other times of the day and night. Meeting energy demand on a 24/7 basis is harder, and Amazon isn’t even trying. 

Let’s start with the numbers. Because the sun doesn’t shine all the time, a large solar array produces, on average, 22-25% of what it produces on a cloudless day at noon. (That percentage is known as the facility’s capacity factor.) At a 25% capacity factor, Amazon’s 1,386 MW worth of solar panels produce enough electricity to “match” about 347 MW of demand. 

Amazon keeps its energy demand in Virginia a secret, but we can be pretty sure its 110 data centers here use way more than that. A 2019 Greenpeace report estimated Amazon’s Virginia data center demand at 1,700 MW in operation or under construction, an amount that would call for 6,800 MW of solar. Amazon rejected Greenpeace’s estimate at the time, but it didn’t supply a better one. More recent estimates suggest Amazon’s energy appetite in Virginia is on its way to 2,700 MW, enough to require the output of around 11,000 MW of solar. 

Luckily for us, Virginia is part of PJM, a regional transmission grid that covers all or parts of 13 states plus Washington, D.C. Generation sources located anywhere in the region can serve a Virginia customer, and Amazon’s map shows it has utility solar and wind projects in several PJM states. By my count, these add up to as much as 4,000 MW of additional renewable energy that could be allocated to Virginia data centers, if Amazon had no other operations in those states that it wanted to power. (Which, however, it does.) 

Adding together its solar in Virginia and elsewhere in PJM still leaves Amazon short of what it likely needs. So, if the company is correct that it has secured enough renewable energy to match all of its demand, a lot of those facilities must be in other regions or other countries. Yet the climate benefit of Amazon’s solar farms in (for example) Spain, which gets more than 50% of its electricity from renewable energy, is significantly less than the climate benefit of solar in PJM, where the percentage of wind and solar combined still hangs in the single digits. 

I will – almost – give Amazon a pass on this point. PJM has been so appallingly slow to approve new generation that Amazon could well have as many projects in the “queue” as online. PJM claims it will catch up in the next year and a half, and when that happens, perhaps Amazon won’t feel the need to obfuscate.

Even if Amazon were “matching” all its energy needs with wind and solar in PJM, though, it’s the second problem that troubles me more. Building solar and wind is cheap; Amazon very likely makes a profit on it. Actually ensuring renewable energy provides all the juice for the company’s operations every hour of every day, on the other hand, would require a heck of a lot of expensive energy storage. And Amazon is not doing that.

Without energy storage, solar delivers electricity only while the sun is shining. The rest of the time, Amazon’s data centers run on whatever resource mix the local utility uses. In both Virginia and PJM’s territory, fossil fuels make up the great majority of the mix. Building more Amazon data centers in Virginia increases the burning of fossil fuels, causing more pollution and raising costs that are borne by the rest of us. 

The self-styled climate hero turns out to be a climate parasite, harming people to make itself look good.

Combining renewable energy with storage to achieve true carbon neutrality isn’t prohibitively expensive. Other leading tech companies seem to be making that extra effort, with Google notable for its commitment to meeting its energy demand with renewable energy and storage on a 24/7 basis.

Amazon’s failure to rise to this challenge explains why, in spite of its massive investments in wind and solar, the company’s carbon footprint actually rose by 34% since the launch of its Climate Pledge in 2019, when it set a target of net zero carbon emissions by 2040. 

That explains why, a year ago, the Science Based Targets initiative, a U.N.-backed organization that monitors corporate net-zero plans, removed Amazon from a list of companies taking action on climate goals. According to press reports, Amazon failed “to implement its commitment to set a credible target for reducing carbon emissions.”  

Among those least impressed with the company’s efforts are its own workers. Last year, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice accused the company of failing in its climate commitments, and the group released its own report this month alleging multiple climate failures, including using “creative accounting” to inflate its achievements.

If Virginia is serious about meeting the climate challenge, we can’t blindly accept rosy claims from corporations whose central goal is not sustainability, but growth. Data centers whose energy demand isn’t met on a 24/7 basis from zero-carbon sources located on the same grid are not part of the climate solution, they are part of the problem. And currently, Amazon’s data centers are making the problem worse.

This article was first published in the Virginia Mercury on July 24, 2024.

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Growth in data centers overpowers Virginia’s renewable energy gains

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Greenpeace rebranded National Landing, the future home to Amazon’s HQ2, with a human-sized Alexa, lamppost signs and street posters highlighting the company’s stalled progress towards its commitment to power its cloud with 100% renewable energy. Photo credit Greenpeace.

 

More than 100 massive data centers, over 10 million square feet of building space, dot the Northern Virginia landscape around Dulles Airport in what is known as “Data Center Alley.”

And the industry is growing fast.

Local governments welcome the contribution to their tax revenue, but these data centers come with a dark downside: they are energy hogs, and the fossil fuel energy they consume is driving climate change.

A new report from Greenpeace called Clicking Clean Virginia: The Dirty Energy Powering Data Center Alley describes the magnitude of the problem:

“Not including government data centers, we estimate the potential electricity demand of both existing data centers and those under development in Virginia to be approaching 4.5 gigawatts, or roughly the same power output as nine large (500-megawatt) coal power plants.”

As these data center operations continue to grow, they are providing the excuse for utilities, primarily Dominion Energy Virginia, to build new fracked-gas infrastructure, including gas generating plants and the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.

Many of these same tech companies have publicly committed to using renewable energy, and in some cases they have invested heavily in solar and wind power in other states. With the exception of Apple, however, all these data center operators are falling far short in meeting their Virginia energy demand with renewables. Intentionally or not, that makes them complicit in Dominion’s fossil-fuel expansion.

One tech company in particular stands out in the report, due to the sheer size of its operations. Greenpeace calculates that Amazon Web Services, the largest provider of cloud hosting services in the world, has a larger energy load than the next four largest companies combined.

For a while, it looked like AWS would provide leadership commensurate with its size. In 2015, AWS helped break open the solar market in Virginia with an 80-megawatt solar farm. A year later it added another 180 megawatts of solar here, as well as a wind farm in North Carolina in Dominion territory.

Then the investments stopped, while the data center growth continued.

Today, Greenpeace estimates that AWS uses close to 1,700 megawatts for its Virginia data centers. Adjusted for their capacity factors, the renewable energy projects total just 132 megawatts, or less a tenth of the energy the data centers use.

The capacity factor of an energy facility reflects how much energy it actually produces, as opposed to its “nameplate” capacity. A solar facility produces only in daylight, but a data center consumes energy 24/7. To match all of its energy demand with solar energy, AWS would need more than 7,000 megawatts of solar—at least 15 times the amount in all of Virginia today.

For a company whose website promises a commitment to 100 percent renewable energy, that’s a major fail.

The Greenpeace report shows Amazon is not alone in data center operators that are dragging their feet on clean energy. It is simply, by far, the largest. The next three biggest data center operators—Cloud HQ, Digital Reality, and QTS—have no renewable energy at all in Virginia.

Better-known names like Microsoft and Facebook also operate Virginia data centers. Although both have invested in Virginia solar farms, they also fall well short of meeting their energy needs with renewables.

The tech giants are not entirely to blame in all this. As the Greenpeace report details, many of them have asked the General Assembly and the State Corporation Commission for more and better options for purchasing renewable energy. Their requests have largely been ignored.

Virginia’s monopoly system makes it hard for the companies to buy clean electricity from other providers. Our number one monopoly, Dominion Energy, claims to be working hard to meet the large customers’ demand for renewable energy, but its extensive investments in gas infrastructure pose a clear conflict of interest.

Surely, though, if anyone can stand up to Dominion on its home turf, it should be Amazon — which, of course, plans to make Virginia its home turf as well.

And AWS does have options, including more solar as well as land-based wind from the Rocky Forge wind farm and offshore wind from Virginia or North Carolina.

The fact that Amazon doesn’t even seem to be trying should be of great concern to Virginians. As Greenpeace puts it, “AWS’ decision to continue its rapid expansion in Virginia without any additional supply of renewable energy is a powerful endorsement of the energy pathway Dominion has chosen, including the building of the ACP, and a clear signal that its commitment to 100 percent renewable energy will not serve as a meaningful basis for deciding how its data center are powered.”

Amazon has already fired back at the Greenpeace report. In a statement, it asserts that “Greenpeace’s estimates overstate both AWS’ current and projected energy usage.”

However, the statement did not offer a different estimate. It also points to its investments in Virginia renewable energy (the same ones described in the report) and concludes, “AWS remains firmly committed to achieving 100 percent renewable energy across our global network, achieving 50 percent renewable energy in 2018. We have a lot of exciting initiatives planned for 2019 as we work towards our goal and are nowhere near done.”

Well, that’s nice.

But meanwhile, those data centers are using electricity generated from burning fossil fuels, driving climate change, and providing an excuse for new fracked gas infrastructure. Given the rapid pace of data center construction in Virginia, it’s going to take a lot of exciting initiatives from AWS — and all the other data center operators — to make any kind of meaningful impact.