Online retail giant Amazon has announced plans for five PV projects totaling 615MW in three countries to support its commitment to reaching 80% renewable energy by 2024 for its operations and net-zero carbon across its international network of facilities by 2040.
The projects – 105MW in New South Wales, Australia, 100MW in Shandong, China, and 410MW in the states of Ohio and Virginia in the US – will supply 1.2 million MWh of solar power to its warehouses and Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) data centres that support its global cloud computing services.
Kara Hurst, vice president of sustainability, said Amazon has a “credible plan” to reach 100% renewable energy by 2025, five years ahead of the goal it announced last fall, but doing this will be “challenging”, she said.
To date, Amazon has announced 31 utility-scale solar and wind projects and 60 PV rooftops on fulfillment centres and sort centres around the globe, together amounting to a almost 3GW of capacity.
In the US, AWS had contracted 733MW of wind capacity at the end of 2019, sixth among companies behind Google, Facebook, Walmart, AT&T and Microsoft.
Corporations globally bought a record of almost 20GW of wind and solar generation through power production agreements last year, according to analyst group BNEF, a leap of 44% from 2018, and have emerged as a key driver in the accelerating global energy transition.
