[woodhull]

Tim in this piece cites the climate pledge as being an admirable Amazon policy.

Unfortunately, it's all lofty language and Amazon lags behind its peers on real action.

For the AWS cloud business Amazon lags far behind its peers at Microsoft and Google. Of the three main public clouds AWS is the only one still using coal power (coal is a big part of the power mix for the grid used by their largest point of presence in Northern Virgina). Microsoft and Google have run their data centers completely on renewables and have done so for years.

We're stuck on us-east-1 in Northern Virginia for legacy reasons and to make up for the dirty way that Amazon runs its cloud we buy feed-in RECs for the grid where our AWS instances run. AWS could be doing this themselves (there are RECs available! we're buying them!) to help jumpstart the transition to renewables in the energy markets where they operate but they're simply choosing not to spend the money.

Microsoft and Google deserve credit for their work in this area and they're doing a much better job. It's just too bad that AWS is a better technical product for our workload.

[somethingwitty1]

This feels a bit misleading. Both Microsoft and Google still use fossil fuels for their data centers. I understand the "value" of RECs, but it definitely doesn't mean your data center is actually powered by renewable or "clean" energy, despite it allowing you to claim that. I really wish these companies had to publish the real numbers. That would demotivate them to buy RECs though...so here we are.

The climate pledge has started to make an impact: https://climatepledgearena.com/. And there are plenty of articles that seem to indicate the climate pledge is doing things: https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2020/06/30/amazons...

These might be puff pieces, but at least from reading them, it seems like Amazon is actually moving towards doing things. Not only that, but they are getting other companies to sign the pledge and take action.

[woodhull]

what?

Google has been running on 100% renewable electricity since 2017. Microsoft has reached that milestone as well, but I can not find a date for when they achieved it.

AWS aspires to eventually reach that goal by 2025. One of the clouds is dirtier than the others.

[somethingwitty1]

They don't run 100% on renewable electricity. They offset their non-renewable by buying RECs, which allows them to claim they are 100% renewable. RECs work by allowing you to use non-renewable energy (from the coal power plant that is local to your data center/business). Then, you buy an equivalent number of RECs from somewhere else (could be an entirely different state) and you are allowed to claim you run on 100% renewable energy.

See: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/renewable/ "In 2019, for the third year in a row, Google purchased enough renewable energy to match 100 percent of our annual global electricity consumption". They are not running on renewable energy, they are simply buying RECs. Albeit, one can argue that is better than not buying RECs, but it is misleading to claim they are "running on 100% renewable energy"