Amazon obtains green electricity for the cloud from Hamburg company Encavis

The Internet giant Amazon wants to improve its often criticized environmental balance with a green power project in Europe. To supply an energy-intensive data center in Spain, the Hamburg green electricity producer Encavis has secured a major order from Amazon, reports the news magazine Der Spiegel in its current issue.

Locally generated green electricity

The new high-performance computers should therefore be completely powered by green electricity. Unlike the controversial certificate trading, the electricity should be generated locally and directly for this project. The Hamburg-based company plans to commission its own solar park for Amazon in Spain. It should have a capacity of around 200 megawatts, which is equivalent to the size of a smaller gas-fired power plant. The solar park is scheduled to go into operation this fall. The total volume of the contract amounts to more than one hundred million euros.

Amazon had operated the computers of its cloud service AWS in the past mainly with coal and nuclear power. In 2017, the Greenpeace environmental organization's latest Internet energy consumption survey by Internet companies placed Amazon in 12th place, behind Apple, Facebook, Google, HP, and other vendors. The Amazon data centers used 30% electricity from coal power, 26% from nuclear power, and 24% Electricity from gas power plants. Only 17 percent comes from renewable sources.

In a blog entry, Amazon referred to the climate protection promise that the company made at the beginning of the year. In it, the group had announced that it would meet the Paris Agreement ten years earlier and reduce by 2040, the net carbon emissions to zero. "We also plan to use 80 percent renewable energy by 2024 and 100 percent renewable energy by 2030," said Amazon manager Kara Hurst, who is responsible for sustainability at the group. "We are committed to investing in renewable energy as a crucial step in helping our CO₂Downsize footprint worldwide. "

The unusual large order from Amazon strengthens the position of the Hamburg green electricity producer Encavis. Under the leadership of former Eon manager Dierk Paskert, Encavis has become one of the largest independent solar park operators in Europe in recent years.

(Mho)