Greenpeace USA recently released a report entitled, Clicking Clean Virginia – The Dirty Energy Powering Data Center Alley, which stated that Amazon and other cloud computing giants in Virginia’s “Data Center Alley” were failing to meet commitments to power their data centers with 100% renewable energy.
Amazon and AWS (Amazon Web Services) have invested in numerous renewable energy projects. A spokesperson from AWS has released the following statement in response to the Greenpeace report findings:
Greenpeace has chosen to report inaccurate data about the energy consumption and renewable mix of AWS’s infrastructure and did not perform proper due-diligence by fact checking with AWS before publishing. Greenpeace’s estimates overstate both AWS’s current and projected energy usage. Additionally, the report does not properly highlight that AWS has been a major investor in solar projects across the Commonwealth of Virginia and played a leading role in making it easier for us and other companies to bring more renewable energy to Virginia through our Market-Based Rate with Dominion Virginia Power.
As of December 2018, Amazon and AWS have invested in 53 renewable energy projects (six of which are in Virginia), totaling over 1,016 MW and are expected to deliver over 3,075,636 million megawatt-hours (MWh) of energy annually.
Further, AWS advocates for tax and regulatory policies at the federal and state levels to promote renewable energy usage. AWS remains firmly committed to achieving 100% renewable energy across our global network, achieving 50% 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.
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