Amazon announced on Wednesday that effectively all of the electricity its operations used last year came from sources that did not produce greenhouse gas emissions. But some experts have criticized the method the company uses to make that determination as being too lenient.
In its announcement, Amazon said it had reached its goal of 100 percent clean energy seven years ahead of schedule. The company said it invested billions of dollars in more than 500 solar and wind projects to achieve its target. The energy generated by those projects is equivalent to the electricity consumed by the company’s data centers, corporate buildings, grocery stores and fulfillment centers in 27 countries.
But because the solar and wind farms do not all directly power Amazon’s operations — most of that energy is sent to electricity grids that serve many businesses and homes — some critics say that the company’s calculations can create a misleading impression of its effect on the climate.
The clean energy projects Amazon has invested in can produce enough electricity to power the equivalent of 7.6 million U.S. homes, the company said. Amazon aims to reach net-zero carbon emissions from all of its operations, including its delivery vans, planes and other means of transportation, by 2040.
“We’re really excited about, obviously, the goal that we set five years ago and reaching it seven years early,” said Kara Hurst, vice president of worldwide sustainability at Amazon. “That’s quite an achievement for us.”
Amazon and other tech companies have said for years that they aim to eliminate the planet-warming effect of their operations. But those promises have been called into question recently by the industry’s decisions to invest heavily in artificial intelligence, which consumes vast amounts of electricity through its use of data centers.
Environmentalists worry that a surge in electricity demand from data centers, electric cars and heat pumps could lead electric utilities to rely more heavily on natural gas power plants because they won’t be able to build clean energy sources, transmission lines and other infrastructure fast enough.
A large data center can use as much energy as the amount produced by a small power plant serving roughly 100,000 homes.
Tech companies say they are working to increase their use of renewable energy to account for the energy demands of artificial intelligence. Google said last month that it had entered into an agreement with Berkshire Hathaway’s utility in Nevada to power its data centers there with geothermal power. The tech giant said in its latest environmental report that its greenhouse gas emissions grew 13 percent in 2023 over the previous year with the increased demands of A.I.
Google’s agreement with Berkshire Hathaway and investments by Microsoft, Amazon and other companies in new renewable energy projects will be needed to reduce the world’s reliance on natural gas and other fossil fuels, experts said.
“That is real steel in the ground,” said Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “If you actually want to be a part of the clean energy transition, put your money where your mouth is.”
Other energy experts say that despite making big investments in renewables, some companies like Amazon have not been transparent enough about how they are calculating and reporting their use of clean energy.
Amazon received a “B” grade from the CDP, a nonprofit group that operates a global disclosure system for investors, companies, cities, states and regions to manage their environmental impact. Google and Microsoft received “A” grades and were commended for their commitment to clean energy and for being transparent about how they were working to achieve their climate goals.
“A company needs to actually outline, what are the sources that you are accounting for in that calculation?” said Simon Fischweicher, director of supply chain and reporter services at CDP.
Responding to the CDP rating, Ms. Hurst said Amazon has been focused on being accurate in its reporting and has increasingly worked to make more information public.
“I think every single year we are growing and learning and providing more data and being more transparent,” Ms. Hurst said. “At a company our size and scale, collecting more data is challenging at times.”
The company said it achieved its 100 percent clean electricity goal by building new solar and wind farms, installing solar panels on the roofs of some of its buildings, operating facilities on electric grids that already use a lot of renewable energy and utilizing credits produced from the use of carbon-free energy.
No company connected to an electric grid can know for sure that it uses only clean energy if any of the power plants on the grid burn fossil fuels. Companies can try to target their use when resources like solar or wind power provide much or most of the electricity on the grid at certain times of day, like at midday or at night.
As a result, to achieve 100 percent clean energy — at least on paper — companies often buy what are known as renewable energy certificates, or RECs, from a solar or wind farm owner. By buying enough credits to match or exceed the energy its operations use, a company could make the claim that its business is powered entirely by clean energy.
“That’s what we do, buy RECs for projects that are not yet operational,” Ms. Hurst said.