Amazon is the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy, and today we are announcing our first renewable energy project in Singapore, a 62 megawatt (MW) solar project made up of a series of solar panels mounted on a ground system. A benefit of ground-mounted solar is the ability to optimally position the system to capture sun exposure as weather conditions change. When complete in 2022, the project will be among the largest aggregated movable solar energy systems designed and installed in Singapore, and it will contribute net-new renewable energy to the national electricity grid. The project is expected to generate 80,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of clean energy annually, enough to power more than 10,000 homes in Singapore.
Amazon and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have been investing and growing in Singapore for more than a decade. Our announcement today supports Singapore’s bold vision outlined in the Singapore Green Plan 2030, a ten-year plan with a whole-of-nation sustainable development agenda. Utility-scale solar energy projects, such as this Singapore project, align with the Green Plan’s key pillar of using cleaner energy and help Amazon meet its commitment to power our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2030, a goal we are on a path to meet five years early by 2025. This project will supply renewable energy for Amazon offices, fulfillment centers, and AWS data centers that support millions of customers globally.
In addition to adding net-new renewable energy to the electricity grids where we operate across the world, AWS has been, and remains, laser focused on improving efficiency in every aspect of our infrastructure. From the highly available infrastructure that powers our servers, to techniques we use to cool our data centers, to the innovative server designs we provide our customers, energy efficiency is a key goal of our global infrastructure. AWS’s scale allows us to achieve much higher resource utilization and energy efficiency than the typical on-premises data center, and the AWS Global Infrastructure is built on AWS’s own hardware - purpose-built and optimized for workloads run by AWS customers. According to a 451 Research report, AWS’s infrastructure was found to be 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median of surveyed U.S. enterprise data centers, with more than two thirds of this advantage due to a more energy efficient server population and higher server utilization.
AWS also works with customers and partners to help them meet their own sustainability goals. By running their compute workloads in the cloud, customers and partners can benefit from our sustainability efforts and architect their workloads for high efficiency. Ninety percent of what we build is driven by what customers tell us matters. To achieve our shared goals, we focus on four complementary areas: increasing energy efficiency in our facilities and equipment, continuous innovation in our data centers, advocacy to create a favorable environment for renewable energy, and working with various power providers around the world to increase the availability of renewable energy.
Investment in the Asia Pacific region
The Singapore project is our latest renewable energy investment in the Asia Pacific region. Since 2019, we have announced three wind and solar projects in Australia and one solar project in China. Together, these projects contribute approximately 411 MW of installed capacity and will supply more than 900,000 MWh of additional renewable energy to local electricity grids.
To achieve our goals under The Climate Pledge, Amazon is committed to global investment in renewable energy generation to reduce carbon emissions from our worldwide operations. We believe we can use our size and scale to make a difference and spur innovation in new technologies to support a low-carbon economy.
About Amazon’s Climate Pledge
In 2019, Amazon and Global Optimism co-founded The Climate Pledge, a commitment to becoming net-zero carbon by 2040, 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement. Significant investments in renewable energy are a critical step to reducing Amazon’s carbon footprint globally. Amazon is the world’s largest corporate buyer of renewable energy, and the projects we have enabled have the capacity to generate over 6.9 gigawatts and deliver more than 20 million MWhs of energy annually. They include utility-scale wind and solar projects and solar rooftops on fulfillment centers and sort centers around the globe.
We believe in leading by example and invite any company wishing to join The Climate Pledge to talk to us about what we might be able to achieve together. Over 50 other companies have already signed on and also committed to urgent action. Solving the world’s environmental and sustainability challenges is a task that no single organization can take on alone, but working together, we can make a significant impact.
