Amazon announced Wednesday that nearly all of the electricity it used in its operations last year came from sources that did not emit greenhouse gases. But some experts criticized the company’s approach to making that determination as too lax.
In its statement, Amazon said it reached its 100% clean energy goal seven years ahead of schedule. The company said it invested billions of dollars in more than 500 solar and wind projects to reach its goal. The energy generated by these projects is equivalent to the electricity used by the company’s data centers, corporate buildings, grocery stores and fulfillment centers in 27 countries.
But because not all of Amazon’s solar and wind farms directly power its operations — most of that energy is sent to the power grids that serve many businesses and homes — some critics say the company’s calculations can create a misleading impression of its impact on the climate.
The clean energy projects Amazon has invested in can produce enough electricity to power the equivalent of 7.6 million U.S. homes, the company said. Amazon aims to achieve net-zero carbon emissions across all of its operations, including its delivery vans, planes and other transportation, by 2040.
“We’re really excited to have achieved the goal we set five years ago, seven years ahead of schedule,” said Kara Hurst, Amazon’s vice president of global sustainability. “This is a real accomplishment for us.”
Amazon and other tech companies have said for years that they want to eliminate the impact of their operations on global warming. But those promises have recently been called into question by the industry’s decisions to invest heavily in artificial intelligence, which consumes huge amounts of electricity because of its use of data centers.
Environmentalists worry that increased demand for electricity from data centers, electric cars and heat pumps could force power companies to rely more on natural gas plants because they won’t be able to build clean energy sources, transmission lines and other infrastructure quickly enough.
A large data center can use as much energy as a small power plant serving about 100,000 homes produces.
Tech companies say they are working to increase their use of renewable energy to meet the energy needs of artificial intelligence. Google announced last month that it had reached an agreement with utility Berkshire Hathaway in Nevada to power its data centers with geothermal energy. The tech giant said in its latest environmental report that its greenhouse gas emissions are up 13% in 2023 compared with the previous year because of the increased demands of AI.
Google’s deal with Berkshire Hathaway and investments by Microsoft, Amazon and other companies in new renewable energy projects will be needed to reduce the world’s reliance on natural gas and other fossil fuels, experts said.
“This is real steel going into the ground,” said Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental policy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “If you really want to be part of the clean energy transition, walk the talk.”
Other energy experts say that despite significant investments in renewable energy, some companies like Amazon are not being transparent enough about how they calculate and report their clean energy use.
Amazon received a “B” grade from CDP, a nonprofit group that runs a global disclosure system that helps investors, companies, cities, states, and regions manage their environmental impacts. Google and Microsoft received “A” grades and were commended for their commitment to clean energy and transparency on how they are working to meet their climate goals.
“A company actually has to describe the sources that it takes into account in this calculation,” said Simon Fischweicher, director of supply chain and reporting services at CDP.
In response to the CDP rating, Hurst said Amazon has focused on being accurate in its reporting and has increasingly worked to make more information public.
“I think we’re growing, learning, providing more data and being more transparent every year,” Hurst said. “In a company of our size and scope, collecting more data is sometimes a challenge.”
The company said it achieved its 100% clean electricity goal by building new solar and wind farms, installing solar panels on the roofs of some of its buildings, operating facilities on power grids that already use a lot of renewable energy and using credits generated from the use of carbon-free energy.
A group calling itself Amazon Employees for Climate Justice has criticized the company for what its members say is its use of accounting and marketing to make itself look good. The group, made up of thousands of Amazon employees, has previously raised concerns about the company’s climate policies, including on social media, in a 2019 letter to Jeff Bezos, the company’s executive chairman, and at a protest last year outside Amazon’s headquarters.
“As Amazon employees, we are frustrated that Amazon management is misleading the public by misrepresenting the truth about its renewable energy claims,” the company said in a statement about the company’s announcement Wednesday. “Amazon wants us to believe that its data centers are surrounded by wind and solar farms, but the reality is that the company is investing heavily in expanding its data centers powered by West Virginia coal, Saudi Arabian oil and Canadian shale gas.”
No company connected to an electricity grid can be sure that it is using only clean energy if any of the power plants on the grid burn fossil fuels. Companies can try to target their use when resources like solar or wind provide much or most of the grid’s electricity at certain times of the day, such as midday or at night.
To achieve 100% clean energy—at least on paper—companies often purchase what are called renewable energy certificates (RECs) from solar or wind farm owners. By purchasing enough credits to match or exceed the energy consumption of their operations, a company can claim that its operation is powered entirely by clean energy.
“That’s what we do, we buy RECs for projects that are not yet operational,” Hurst said.
In a report released by the Amazon employee group after the company’s announcement, the workers said their research concluded that after factoring out Amazon’s use of the credits, actual investment in clean energy was a fraction of what was publicly reported.
“There’s no point in buying a bunch of RECs,” Stokes said. “You just need to invest in real projects.”