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Amazon Says It Has Hit 100% Renewable Energy Goal by 2023 — Here’s What That Means

Posted on by darion

Top line

Amazon announced Wednesday that it has reached a key environmental milestone by having all of the electricity its operations use in 2023 “combine” with 100% renewable energy. Some experts say the claim lacks much detail as the tech giant releases its annual sustainability report.

Key facts

In a blog post, the company said it had achieved its 2019 goal of offsetting energy use across all of its global operations — including “data centers, corporate buildings, grocery stores, and fulfillment centers” — with renewable energy, seven years ahead of schedule.

Amazon said it had achieved its goal, becoming the “world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy” for the fourth year in a row and investing “billions of dollars” to build more than 500 solar and wind projects around the world.

The company’s claim does not mean that it uses 100% renewable energy to power its operations, but rather that it purchases an equivalent amount of energy from solar and wind farms, which is then transmitted to the public grid.

Despite purchasing the offset, the company’s sustainability report showed that Amazon’s emissions from its direct operations increased by 7% in 2023 compared to the previous year.

The report also found that Amazon’s carbon footprint has increased by 34% since the launch of its Climate Pledge in 2019, which aims to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, although it fell by 3% in 2023 compared with 2022.

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Big number

13%. That’s how much Amazon says its “carbon intensity” fell in 2023 compared with the previous year. The company describes carbon intensity as the grams of carbon dioxide emissions it generates per dollar of “gross merchandise sales.” That metric is down more than 34% since 2019.

Against

Some experts have criticized Amazon’s climate claims for being vague and lacking transparency in its reporting. The nonprofit Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), which works on climate disclosures, gave Amazon’s climate change report a “B” grade, which is lower than the A- it gave Apple last year and the A grades Google and Microsoft gave Amazon. Commenting on Amazon’s rating, a CDP executive told the New York Times that the company “needs to actually provide” the sources it used to come up with its calculations. In May, a coalition of Amazon employees, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, organized a walkout and criticized Amazon for “getting worse, not better, on climate issues.”

Tangent

Kara Hurst, Amazon’s vice president of global sustainability, addressed concerns about the AI ​​boom driving up energy demand in a Wednesday report: “Our progress toward a zero-carbon business is not going to be linear, and we’re going to have different results every year as our different businesses grow and evolve.” She told Bloomberg: “There are things like AI that are coming along that we’re going to have to grapple with, but I think we have so many tools that we didn’t even have a few years ago.”

Further reading

Amazon says it hit climate goal seven years early (New York Times)