How AWS Innovates for Sustainability

By Darren Hardman, VP, General Manager, UK & Ireland at Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I’m often asked how Amazon Web Services (AWS) is working to make our business—and those of our customers—more sustainable. So here is a short update about our progress towards powering our operations with 100% renewable energy. I will also be discussing this at our EMEA AWS Summit Online Innovation Day if you’d like to learn more.

There are many reasons why I am passionate about the topic of sustainability, too many to list in this blog, so I thought I’d start with two.

First, it’s good business. It matters to our customers and suppliers, and to governments too. Environmental, social, and corporate governance issues are driving buying and investment decisions and shaping regulatory policy like never before. For a business like ours, it makes sense to prioritise a sustainable approach.

Second, I live in this world. My children live in this world. We all have people we love and care about, and we want to protect and provide for them and build a better world for future generations. That’s what sustainability is about.

The Climate Pledge

We are committed to building a sustainable business for our customers and the planet.

In 2019, the company co-founded The Climate Pledge. Participating businesses have committed to net-zero carbon emissions by 2040—a decade ahead of the Paris Climate Agreement. The Pledge now has more than 100 companies on board, including 52 new signatories that joined in April.

Going Big on Renewable

Making big changes, like achieving net-zero carbon across our business, means finding innovative ways to operate. For us, this includes launching solar and wind projects around the world which already have capacity of more than 20 million megawatt hours each year.

Today, we have a total of 206 renewable energy projects globally, including 71 utility-scale wind and solar renewable energy projects, and 135 solar rooftops on facilities and stores. As part of this, we recently announced a 350-megawatt wind farm off the Scottish coast, which is the largest corporate renewable energy project in the UK.

As well as our own renewable energy projects, we recently became Europe’s largest corporate buyer of renewable energy. We have 2.5 GW of renewable energy capacity in Europe, enough to power more than two million homes a year.

Looking at all those projects together, it’s important to remember that sustainability benefits from the network effect. When we invest in renewable energy, it helps the companies we work with to grow and develop, and to find new and better ways of doing what they’re good at. That spreads the benefits further.

A Sustainable Technology Partner

You can see the network effect I mentioned in how AWS helps its customers operate more sustainably. As a cloud services provider, scale helps us achieve a higher resource utilisation and energy efficiency than the typical on-premises data centre. Analysis by 451 Research found that our infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy efficient than enterprise data centres.

Our technology also helps businesses innovate to provide sustainable solutions for their own customers.

EDF Energy, the UK’s largest producer of low-carbon electricity, uses AWS to improve energy management. Large industrial and commercial customers of EDF can use an energy trading system based on AWS to reduce demand and shift energy usage to off-peak times.

Our infrastructure also helps Octopus Energy efficiently provide its customers with access to cheaper electricity when renewable energy is abundant.

So sustainability is a major area of innovation for us. We are committed to running our operations in an environmentally-friendly way, as well as helping our customers reduce their environmental impact and meet their carbon reduction goals.

To learn more about what AWS is doing in sustainability and to “Rethink Possible”, attend our EMEA AWS Summit Online Innovation Day on Thursday 10 June.