Amazon Says It Now Runs On 100% Clean Power. Employees Say It's More Like 22% (fastcompany.com) 90
Today, Amazon announced that it reached its 100% renewable energy goal seven years ahead of schedule. However, as Fast Company's Adele Peters reports, "a group of Amazon employees argues that the company's math is misleading." From the report: A report (PDF) from the group, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, argues that only 22% of the company's data centers in the U.S. actually run on clean power. The employees looked at where each data center was located and the mix of power on the regional grids -- how much was coming from coal, gas, or oil versus solar or wind. Amazon, like many other companies, buys renewable energy credits (RECs) for a certain amount of clean power that's produced by a solar plant or wind farm. In theory, RECs are supposed to push new renewable energy to get built. In reality, that doesn't always happen. The employee research found that 68% of Amazon's RECs are unbundled, meaning that they didn't fund new renewable infrastructure, but gave credit for renewables that already existed or were already going to be built.
As new data centers are built, they can mean that fossil-fuel-dependent grids end up building new fossil fuel power plants. "Dominion Energy, which is the utility in Virginia, is expanding because of demand, and Amazon is obviously one of their largest customers," says Eliza Pan, a representative from Amazon Employees for Climate Justice and a former Amazon employee. "Dominion's expansion is not renewable expansion. It's more fossil fuels." Amazon also doesn't buy credits that are specifically tied to the grids powering their data centers. The company might purchase RECs from Canada or Arizona, for example, to offset electricity used in Virginia. The credits also aren't tied to the time that the energy was used; data centers run all day and night, but most renewable energy is only available some of the time. The employee group argues that the company should follow the approach that Google takes. Google aims to use carbon-free energy, 24/7, on every grid where it operates.
As new data centers are built, they can mean that fossil-fuel-dependent grids end up building new fossil fuel power plants. "Dominion Energy, which is the utility in Virginia, is expanding because of demand, and Amazon is obviously one of their largest customers," says Eliza Pan, a representative from Amazon Employees for Climate Justice and a former Amazon employee. "Dominion's expansion is not renewable expansion. It's more fossil fuels." Amazon also doesn't buy credits that are specifically tied to the grids powering their data centers. The company might purchase RECs from Canada or Arizona, for example, to offset electricity used in Virginia. The credits also aren't tied to the time that the energy was used; data centers run all day and night, but most renewable energy is only available some of the time. The employee group argues that the company should follow the approach that Google takes. Google aims to use carbon-free energy, 24/7, on every grid where it operates.
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Why, it's enough to make me pour hot grits down my pants!
Something from the marketing department (Score:3)
Why is anyone surprised that it is a lie ?
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They might be true on paper through carbon credits, which is just a scam. It is a loophole for corporations and countries to continue polluting massively by fake offsetting with paying someone to plant a tree.
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They might be true on paper through carbon credits, which is just a scam.
Carbon credits aren't a scam if used correctly. The problem is the way the credits were distributed was a scam. If Amazon is directing the money "credits" directly into something like solar projects it's legit. If they are are funneling them into the "I promise I won't cut down this tree" initiatives they should have their testicles removed and forcefed to themselves.
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It is a loophole for corporations and countries to continue polluting massively.
This comment requires some introspection. Do you *believe* they are doing so for no good reason?
...or do these corporates exist in some fantastical vaccum where they do things with no reason or purpose?
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Requiring consumers to determine which products pollute {snip}.
See, this is the point. Consumers. The sheer mass of consumers cannnot, in any way, be removed from the equation.
The only effective solution is fewer consumers. Given that will NEVER happen because humans are self destructive, everything else is just finger pointing in order to avoid responsibility.
Production does not happen in isolation. We really need to stop arguing as if it does.
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How is a customer supposed to be aware of the amount of environmental destruction a company caused to manufacture, assemble, and transport a particular product? You'd have to have an extreme knowledge of the supply chain and logistics of every product you purchased!
So are we talking about eugenics, genocide, starvation? How do we quickly and ethic
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Who cares? These bespoke "green initiatives" are the wrong way to address climate change. They are just PR. People should stop seeing them as signals of virtue.
Green power benefits from scale and distribution, which individual companies can't provide.
We should focus on greening the entire grid, and then Amazon can pull green power from the grid just like everyone else.
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It's actually the opposite for intermittents. The more scale, the less efficiency, because it's not dispatchable. So at scale you overload the grid with too much power when it's sunny and windy, and when it's not windy nor sunny grid craters. This is what we're discovering in Europe right now, because the idiotic screeching about "but if you make it continent wide, it's windy somewhere" nutjobbery was finally put to the real life test when we unified grids.
And now you can have a couple of cents negative and
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Except bespoke 'green initiatives' are exactly the answer.
Read "The Real Environmental Crisis" - Jack Hollander (2004). It makes a pretty solid argument that making things more expensive isn't the fix. People will generally speaking think about their individual actions and decided to do the ecologically conscious thing; when they have choice.
If for example you decide you are going to levy an excessive carbon tax on gasoline, and Joe is struggling to make ends meet looks at his situation. He might / probably
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That seems incredibly untrue.
Just based on my observations.
I see a ton of trash and leaf burning in areas with free disposal (but not pick up), tons of not using the recycle bin even though it's picked up free, and disposal of a car load is only $7.50, but commercial dumpsters are unsafe from trash pirates.
Re: Something from the marketing department (Score:2)
That is a really strange comparison - global 1x tax on energy carbon costs vs 0.25x tax on reducing carbon costs for an individual task?
I'm not a big fan of the gas tax as a solution but it has the benefit of clear incentives and enforcement.
Sure - all things equal you can convince a consumer to make a single decision based on a single factor other than price: branding, fashion, health, charity, veganism, culture wars... virtue signaling in general.
But global warming is a systemic externality for most moder
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But they legitimately paid the certificate broker to lie for amazon! It's not a lie if you paid someone off to claim it
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It's my opinion that literally everything Amazon says and does at this point is dishonest, duplicitous marketing, from the 'service documentation' which misleads you as to what the services does at AWS, to how they claim to be a "customer obsessed" company with leadership principles which guide their decision making process. They may staff technical people, but it's run by the lawyers and marketeers.
Like any corporation which has been captured by long-term fiefdom-building employees, those leadership princi
Mandatory Training (Score:3)
Sounds like some employees didn't attend the training course that explained what angle to hold your head at while reading the "clean power" meter.
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Parallax is ineffective on digital displays. ;-)
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I'm sure there's an entire internal training series that's required quarterly.
I don't know what to believe (Score:5, Funny)
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I mean if you can't trust faceless corporations run by evil, dystopian billionaires who can you trust?
Kibo
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I mean if you can't trust faceless corporations run by evil, dystopian billionaires who can you trust?
How dare they (checks notes) support clean energy by buying RECs?
Green energy offsets? (Score:1)
Buying plenary indulgences while still polluting is utter bullshit.
Sorry.
So pump a load of crap into the air, buying dirty power.
Then paying someone to wash away their "sins", bless you and declare that stuff is nnow "CLEAN"?
FUCK RIGHT THE HELL OFF!
You'll never be "green" enough for this crowd (Score:5, Insightful)
I liked and supported the old environmentalist movement: let's clean up the air, clean up the water, take better care of our natural resources. Their motivations were clear, their proposals made sense, and everyone benefited. These new "green" folks aren't about care for the environment, they're more like a front for anti-capitalism, definitely more a political movement than a scientific one, that's for sure. One gets the impression that, since this really isn't about the environment, you can never actually be "green" enough by merely doing what they say. To be "green", you have to want to overthrow the West, basically.
I dunno. YMMV. It doesn't seem like a straightforward movement to me.
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The old ones were harder to dodge because they had clear goals.
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The old ones were easier to dodge because they had clear goals. When there are clear objective goals, you can plan around them. Hilariously, dodging cleaned the environment, because when your goal is something objective, simple and localized, you can actually achieve it. DDT for example is largely a solved problem in most places. So are acid rains (in developed world). So is desertification in most of China and India.
Current ones adjust goals to meet anti-capitalist needs. So industry can't adjust and tends
Re: You'll never be "green" enough for this crowd (Score:3)
Either that or growth can't be green and our current iteration of capitalism relies on growth, therefore it can't be green in its current form.
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For those who question the "current environmentalism is not environmentalist but anti-capitalist", here's a counter example in action.
Re: You'll never be "green" enough for this crowd (Score:2)
Maybe you missed the words "in its current form"? I made pretty clear that the issue is with growth, not capitalism. That we currently equate capitalism with growth is not my decision, and I think part of the issue.
Anyhow feel free to provide examples of growth that do not involve more resource consumption and more greenhouse gas emissions.
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And for those who think that greens are not genocidal, second paragraph is great example of opposite as well.
Re: You'll never be "green" enough for this crowd (Score:2)
Sure, distort my words to extreme levels of absurdity. We're talking about economic growth. Why chose the absurd stupid interpretation instead of the one that makes sense?
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You are. And economic growth is what enabled the current poor to exist. If you take it away, they starve. As we've seen in Africa in 2000s.
Being genocidal and stupid doesn't excuse genocidality.
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Growth can be green so long as it is sustainable. Conveniently enough capitalism also requires sustainability. Most of the conflicts I see between the green movement and capitalism is that green advocates want to allocate resources and use stratagems which aren't sustainable and capitalism demands you keep the checkbook balanced.
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Capitalism is neutral with regard to who the profit goes to but if the activity isn't profitable that means it isn't sustainable. Capitalism is a resource balancing, prioritization, and allocation system with built in logistics handling.
The 'price' is a reflection of resource consumption, if you can't generate a profit it means you are using more resources [or more scarce ones] than you are producing and therefore your strategy isn't sustainable and scalable. Capitalism is a tool which helps you find the an
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..if you can't generate a profit it means you are using more resources [or more scarce ones] than you are producing and therefore your strategy isn't sustainable and scalable
Some very useful and beneficial endeavors don't produce measurable resources or profit, they benefit society in other ways which do produce profit (or reduce loss) but do so indirectly and over the longer term. E.g. programs which reduce homelessness, they cost money upfront for no immediate return, but it turns out homeless people end up costing society a lot more in the long term if you don't have such programs. Capitalism is bad at measuring these long-term benefits, and society as a whole loses out.
An
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"don't produce measurable resources or profit, they benefit society in other ways which do produce profit (or reduce loss) but do so indirectly and over the longer term"
Then they generate profit, those aren't exceptions they are just more difficult to quantify examples of capitalism working.
"E.g. programs which reduce homelessness, they cost money upfront for no immediate return, but it turns out homeless people end up costing society a lot more in the long term if you don't have such programs."
Then prove i
Re: You'll never be "green" enough for this crowd (Score:2)
oh hey what's up shaitan? how is the bitcoin-supported texas energy grid holding up? roflmao maybe direct capital investment would have worked better but what do i know.
hope your grandma is okay and has not died of exposure. mining lots of btc and praying for you.
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"how is the bitcoin-supported texas energy grid holding up? roflmao maybe direct capital investment would have worked better but what do i know."
Apparently you don't know much because it has gone extraordinarily well. Last year miners hit a number of points where the grid paid more than mining and shifting over the mining power contributed capacity to the grid when it was needed most.
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The motivations are clear and the specific target is very concrete, to curb hydrocarbon combustion into the atmosphere. Data clearly suggests the biggest existential threat is that we are going to get screwed and the most credible theory is carbon dioxide screwing us up. I don't see a whole lot of stuff that is popular that is not pretty directly linked to that issue.
The criticism here is very consistent with general findings about "energy credits". There's widely reported scenarios of reneweable energy c
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The motivations are clear and the specific target is very concrete, to curb hydrocarbon combustion into the atmosphere.
If that were truly the case then modern environmentalists wouldn't be so rabidly anti-nuclear.
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If anything, I see the environmentalist crowd being pretty vocal about being pro-nuclear.
The anti-nuclear people I think is a bit distinct concern. When there's overlap they get a bit unrealistic about the practical capabilities of solar and wind to be sure, but I think plenty of folks on the "pro-hydrocarbon" side are part of the anti-nuclear voice. Anti-Nuclear I see as mostly being more NIMBY with imagining brand new reactors being a risk of a Chernobyl or Fukushima. I don't think you see a lot of peo
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"Here they point out that sucking down tons of energy resulted in the energy company building out more hydrocarbon power plants, it's ludicrous to claim that you are '100% renewable' when your activity directly results in more hydrocarbon consumption."
Agreed but when I pointed out this problem comes on the nation grid where energy companies can play a shell game, importing additional hydrocarbon energy from other states and where they also do not have an open market, so consumers can't choose their energy s
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If I'm recycling from my house and then a huge tanker is using dirty oil, my efforts are worthless in comparison.
There are a lot more individuals who could be cumulatively recycling than there are tankers. So together, you all could be making a significant difference.
Typical COMINTERN logic: "We can't get any benefits until every last person is drawn into our system."
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Sure, you are adding to the giant plastic island in the middle of the ocean because they aren't really recycling that plastic.
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Even the 'old' environmental movement (which is still firmly in play) was about "protecting wetlands" and discouraging real ecologically beneficial activities. They've been largely responsible for moving on from coal, for instance, by putting a pin in nuclear development.
Otherwise, I agree completely about these new eco-corpo-terrorists. It's all a profit driven scam.
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True enough. It becomes clear when you see some of the measures/attempts from the oil companies. Obviously they come up with answers that somehow keep them in the game and yes, some of those answers are obvious bullshit to scoop up federal funds for green initiatives. But some could be viable... especially when you account for not having to fight the oil industry and its lobby but the new age greenies come out and attack them religiously because they can't accept a green revolution that doesn't include 'jus
Move Amazon's exec suite to South Florida (Score:2)
This summer is going to see incredibly destructive hurricanes hitting the US mainland because global worming is here now. It's way past time that the greedy executive types have to put their lives on the line and face the damage they haver personally caused. Let them face flooding, power outages, food scarcity, disease and all the other horrible consequences of their insane pursuit of individual wealth.
They lie, cut cut every corner, buy judges and
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Death toll from extreme weather events is at all time low. In spite of massive increase in population in those places.
We build things better now. Yes, before Biden made that into his slogan. Also outside North Atlantic, extreme wind events are less strong globally. So yes, we're all paying for it building better buildings, and have been for decades in zones where there are more extreme weather events. And adaptation is way cheaper than net zero plans, not to mention way less impoverishing. Funny how your ty
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It's a 100% certainty you always want to cut taxes and services for those at the bottom end of the economy. If hypocrisy was poisonous you would be a toxic waste site.
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And now, you're projecting your status seeking behaviour and what stands behind it on me. Likely because you're deeply ashamed of your motivations, and rarely meet someone like myself who doesn't do virtue signalling for status and instead actually talks about underlying issues.
Lets abolish the NFL (Score:2)
Probably true on the national grid (Score:1)
On the national grid they can play a power shell game forever because normal consumers can't choose the kind of power they want to use and states can fill any shortage with fossil from out of state.
On something like the Texas grid this won't work because consumers are free to choose their retailer and require that retailer purchase renewable energy... sure it can come from existing renewable but it is a market, more demand for renewable without growing supply increases price. There is no filling in with jui
Gotta love green washing (Score:2)
We're in the process right now of setting up a fairly large solar installation under a special commercial micro-generation program here (this is not home solar we're talking about here). The whole thing is based on the idea that companies who want to be green will buy power from a special pool at a much higher rate than the normal gas-fired power. They do this also to get carbon credits and other such things to offset their carbon footprint. At the same time it offsets our own electrical usage, but the r
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It still saves on gas right now.
At least your program is building out actual PV. The REC industry is just selling paper, management and sales are almost certainly taking up the vast amount of revenue.
Greenwashing (Score:2)
Given how easy it is for corporations to greenwash, there really should be some strict rules that require them to a) file their emissions, b) be truthful in their calculations and their wording, c) provide specific and detailed information, d) hold the board & shareholders legally responsible for accuracy and meeting emissions targets set by the company or countries they operate within. It shouldn't be acceptable for some corp to buy up a forest feigning it was under the threat of development when it wa
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It's not so much corporations as upper and middle classes in general. Because greenwashing is ultimately a status game, and the fundamental goal is to differentiate oneself from the unwashed masses.
It's just that since it's the upper and middle classes that run corporations, and status games are their world, it projects into what corporations do.
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No, it's corporations. This is capitalism we're talking about and because capitalism thinks of profits and shareholders, there is NO WAY that companies will voluntarily do something that costs them money to do. It's cheaper to pretend to be green than actually be green. And so they greenwash. They need to be compelled to be truthful under law, not paint a picture not backed up by their actions. And that should extend to advertising claims too.
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>there is NO WAY that companies will voluntarily do something that costs them money to do.
Your mental model of capitalism is a caricature of reality. Corporations voluntarily do something that costs them money to do ALL THE TIME. They do it right now. They did it in the past. They will do it in the future.
Because ultimately, corporations are made of people, and people are driven by status seeking. And money is just one aspect that grants status, and it mainly grants status to males. As female empowerment
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It's not a caricature, it's cold economics borne out by reality.
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Borne out by your imagination, certainly. Reality where ESG reports are very real, not so much.
Yep - Sounds about right! (Score:1)
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It's representative across pretty much everything everywhere. Because no one actually cares about the issue. Everyone with status cares about status. Declarations of status increasing things are in fact more valuable than actually doing things claimed for status. And since everyone plays this game, only people who don't participate in it and a handful of true believers notice that emperor has no clothes.
And in most cases, so long as most participants agree to continue the game, a few dissenters are easy to
Someone else's problem field (Score:2)
In theory, RECs are supposed to push new renewable energy to get built. In reality, it creates the neoliberal equivalent of a someone else's problem field.
There, fixed that for you.
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Prestige projects (Score:2)
I don't think there is anything wrong with prestige projects, as long as they are honest.
Make 1 distribution center completely off grid with PV + battery + electrolysers + hydrogen storage + fuel-cells. Just to show it can be done and that there is a way forward other than nuclear. Saving 0.1% for real is better than 100% on paper.
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That idea has considerable merit. The first attempt will fail, but how it fails will be very informative. How many rockets did Musk crash before he got one down safely?
At the very least they will learn how to build a data center that can quickly restart. The easy green solution of turning the data center off at night remains unthinkable.
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Distribution centers need significantly less power, would be better for a first attempt. The forklifts can run on hydrogen too. In say Arizona it's probably doable, Alaska not so much.
Are "unbundled" RECs Amazon's fault? (Score:2)
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Even when some states use them in non voluntary markets, no one is making Amazon buy this many of them. That's just managers preening to other managers.
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The problem is not with the RECs, but the way Amazon marketed it. Amazon wrote (and I quote) "All of the electricity consumed by Amazon’s operations, including its data centers, was matched with 100% renewable energy in 2023."
That's not what RECs do. The green energy was produced, purchased, and consumed by somebody else. RECs do not mean that the green energy was put into the grid and you purchased it through the distribution system, and by claiming that they "matched" with green energy, they are imp
Myth (Score:2)
A myth is as good as a mile. In this case, the myth of clean energy.
Labour saving :-) (Score:2)
You used to need an engineer and a small army of trained technicians to credibly fake environmental protections. With carbon offsetts all you need is an accountant.