Amazon.com Inc. today announced that it’s investing in 37 new renewable energy projects around the world, including wind farms, solar farms and rooftop solar panel installations.
The investment is expected to make another 3 gigawatts of clean energy capacity available for the company. Amazon plans to eventually power its entire operations using clean energy. The online retail and technology giant expects to meet this goal by 2025, five years earlier than its original target.
The 37 new renewable energy projects that Amazon announced today are located in the U.S., Spain, France, Australia, Canada, India, Japan and the United Arab Emirates. They include three new wind farms, as well as 26 solar farms. Amazon is moreover setting up eight new solar panel installations at corporate campuses around the world.
As part of its investment in renewable energy, the company is increasing its use of energy storage systems. Two of the new solar power projects in which Amazon is investing include battery-based storage systems with a combined capacity of 225 megawatts.
“Given the growth of our business, and our mission to run 100% of Amazon’s operations on renewable energy, we aren’t slowing our renewable investments down,” said Amazon Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy. “We now have 310 wind and solar projects across 19 countries, and are working hard to reach our goal of powering 100% of our business on renewable energy by 2025—five years ahead of our original target of 2030.”
Amazon ranked as the world’s largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in 2020 and 2021. The 37 projects that the company announced today are expected to increase its renewable energy portfolio’s capacity by another 30%.
Once all the 310 projects in which Amazon has invested become fully operational, they will produce 15.7 gigawatts of electricity. The company expects that the projects will help avoid 17.3 million metric tons of carbon emissions every year, which is equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of more than 3.7 million cars.
Amazon’s sustainability efforts also extend to other areas. In 2019, the company set a goal of carrying out half its shipments with a net-zero carbon footprint by 2030. Amazon eventually hopes to achieve net zero carbon emissions across all its shipments.
As part of the effort, the company is buying 100,000 electric delivery vans from Rivian Automotive Inc., an electric vehicle maker that went public last year. The vehicles that Rivian is supplying are based on a custom design that Amazon helped develop. In February, Amazon announced that it will also be the first commercial customer of an upcoming electric van from automaker Stellantis NV.
Earlier, Amazon established a $2 billion venture capital fund to back companies developing sustainable technologies and services. The fund has made more than a half dozen investments since launching in 2020.