Amazon’s carbon footprint shrank by 3% last year, marking its second straight year of decline.
In its annual sustainability report, the cloud, e-commerce and entertainment giant touted its clean energy accomplishments, noting it has purchased a volume of renewable power equal to its electricity use — meaning Amazon hit its 100% clean energy target seven years ahead of its goal.
The report, released Wednesday, also said Amazon’s electric delivery fleet has reached 19,000 vehicles worldwide, with plans to increase that number five-fold by the end of the decade. It called out the addition of 77 new signatories to The Climate Pledge, an initiative launched by Amazon in which entities commit to hitting net-zero carbon by 2040.
But the Seattle-area corporation also hinted at challenges ahead.
“Our progress toward a net-zero carbon business will not be linear, and each year as our various businesses grow and evolve, we will produce different results,” said Kara Hurst, Amazon’s chief sustainability officer, in a forward to the report.
“These results will be influenced by significant changes to our business, investments in growth, and meeting the needs of our customers,” she continued. “Through it all, we will remain steadfast as we invent, adapt, and will our way to meeting our commitment to The Climate Pledge.”
Amazon and the other big tech companies are struggling to reconcile their ambitious climate targets with surging energy demands created by the increased use of artificial intelligence and tools that incorporate it.
Microsoft and Google both marked significant increases in their carbon emissions last year, with Microsoft’s footprint growing 20% and Google’s expanding 13%. They both pointed to higher energy use to power AI operations and data center construction as helping drive the ballooning climate impacts.
These demands are creeping up on Amazon as well. The company is investing heavily in data center infrastructure to power its AI services.
“To date, we have focused on scaling renewable energy; going forward, the nature of our business requires us to leverage additional carbon-free energy options — such as nuclear — to support our continued growth and enable us to develop and deploy new technologies such as AI,” states the report.
While Amazon has shown recent declines in emissions, for many years they increased steadily. From 2020 to 2023, the company’s carbon impact rose 13%. By comparison, Microsoft’s emissions increased 29% over that time and Google’s soared 67%.
Thanks in large part to its retail operations, Amazon has a significantly bigger footprint than the other two tech companies. Its emissions last year were 68.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent — about the same as Hungary, and more than four times higher than either Microsoft or Google.
Some of Amazon’s other climate friendly efforts last year included:
- Using lower-carbon concrete and steel for 29 Amazon building projects.
- Creating new computer processing chips for use in its data centers that are more energy efficient.
- Reducing by 9% by weight the amount of single-use plastic packaging used per shipment for deliveries worldwide.
- Co-founding the Zero Emission Maritime Buyers Alliance to support zero-emission shipping, including a request for proposals for carbon-free shipping services by 2025.
- Increasing the volume of items shipped by lower-carbon rail by 45% in Europe and 25% in the U.S.
Amazon has invested in 513 renewable energy projects globally — namely wind and solar installations — with 28 gigawatts of capacity. However, these power sources aren’t available when the sun sets and the wind isn’t blowing, but data centers run 24/7. That means there are times when Amazon is getting its electricity from fossil fuel sources.
Microsoft and Google, in contrast, have vowed to procure clean energy that matches their operations around the clock. Both are supporting companies trying to develop fusion power, which generates energy through reactions like those stoking the sun. Fusion could be an essentially limitless source of clean energy, but the technology is not yet commercially viable and skeptics argue it might never be.
Google is no longer purchasing cheap carbon offsets, Bloomberg reported this week.
Other clean energy strategies being pursued by tech companies include geothermal power, batteries and conventional nuclear power that splits atoms.
Earlier this year, news broke that Amazon Web Services is buying a data center in Pennsylvania that’s plugged into the nation’s sixth largest nuclear power plant.
https://ift.tt/8bcryMX July 10, 2024 at 09:00AM GeekWire
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