Amazon: The Largest Corporate Purchaser of Renewable Energy

By purchasing renewable energy — including wind, solar and hydro — companies can significantly reduce their carbon emissions and use less fossil fuels, benefitting both their business and the environment.
According to BloombergNEF, businesses signed a record 36.7GW of corporate renewable power purchase agreements (PPAs) in 2022, equivalent to approximately 10% of all the renewable power capacity added globally that year.
With more than 600 projects globally, Amazon is the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy.
This also supports solar and wind initiatives in regions with polluted grids to help curb emissions.
Amazon: A renewable energy powerhouse
Amazon is committed to a future powered entirely by renewable energy, something underpinned by its title as the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for five years running.
“Amazon isn’t just the top corporate purchaser of solar and wind, we’re also prioritising projects in the locations where they can have the biggest impact on curbing emissions and improving the local environment,” Amazon’s CSO Kara Hurst says.
“When it comes to addressing climate change, speed and location matter.
“From collaborating on new energy policies, to accelerating renewables in underserved regions, Amazon is working to help decarbonise grids around the world as quickly as possible.”
As well as purchasing renewable energy from projects around the world, Amazon also supports their creation — meaning that without Amazon, many projects would not exist.
These projects have a combined capability that is able to powering the equivalent of 8.3 million US homes.
“Through these projects, we help match the electricity consumed by our operations and bring net-new renewable energy to the grid, making it more sustainable and reliable for everyone,” Amazon says.
“We’re also focused on placing projects on grids that rely heavily on carbon-intensive energy sources, where a solar or wind farm can have an even greater impact on avoiding carbon emissions and help phase out less sustainable energy options.”
Amazon’s renewable energy journey
To date, Amazon has expanded its renewable energy portfolio to include more than 600 wind and solar projects globally.
The company has strategically invested in more than 40 utility-scale solar and wind projects across regions with significant fossil fuel dependency and high emission rates. These investments span multiple countries, including Australia, China, Greece, India, Indonesia, Poland and South Africa, as well as US states such as Louisiana and Mississippi.
This enables Amazon to maximise the impact of its renewable energy initiatives in curbing emissions and improving local environmental conditions.
In its 2023 sustainability report, Amazon declared that it had reached its 100% renewables target seven years early — with the original goal being to match 100% of the electricity consumed by its global operations with renewable energy by the end of the decade.
Notable projects include its Great Prairie wind farm in Texas, which is the largest renewable energy project in Amazon’s global portfolio. The site is home to 350 wind turbines and more than 1,000MW of total capacity.
Over in China, Amazon’s Daqing wind farm boasts 27 turbines, generating more than 300,000MWh of clean energy annually.
And in Brazil, its 122MW solar farm — Amazon's first project in South America — includes a US$380,000 investment in environmental programmes.
“Building renewable energy anywhere is a good thing, but studies show that building projects in hard-to-decarbonise communities drives the greatest environmental impact — an important step that too many companies are leaving behind,” Gavin McCormick, Executive Director of WattTime and Co-Founder of Climate TRACE says.
“Amazon is proving it is possible to bring renewable energy to high-impact regions like Poland, South Africa and India.
“While these regions might be challenging to build in, they aren’t impossible and these investments are a critical step to helping slow the pace of climate change.”
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