Greenpeace Unimpressed w/ AWS Renewable Energy Pledge
Amazon Web Services has recently announced that they have committed to running their cloud datacenters using 100% renewable energy. The announcement comes off the heels of Amazon’s re:Invent 2014 event held in Las Vegas. Amazon, like other tech giants such as Google and Facebook, has made this commitment to becoming environmentally responsible in regards to growing pressure from advocacy groups. In April of 2014, Greenpeace released a report that lambasted the cloud computing giant.
In Greenpeace’s statement earlier this year, they mentioned, “Despite the recent adoption of 100% renewable energy commitments by competitors Rackspace, Google and Apple, AWS continues to rapidly expand its global infrastructure without any apparent regard to environmental impact or access to renewable energy.”
Amazon made its renewable energy announcement on Wednesday. Not wasting any time, Greenpeace has followed up on Amazon’s commitment to use 100% renewable energy sources with additional criticism. The criticism stems from the fact that while Amazon has made this 100% renewable energy claim, Amazon has not followed up with a road map or a plan of action that goes into detail about how AWS plans on achieving their 100% renewable energy goal.
David Pomerantz, the senior climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace, provided an interview to iTnews in regards to AWS’s announcement. Pomerantz noted that this was a “Potential breakthrough” however Amazon’s commitment lacked a “Detailed snapshot of its energy and greenhouse gas footprint and commit to providing regular updates as it changes.”
Pomerantz continues by saying, “If their announcement means they are in fact going to be switching their operations to be powered by 100 percent renewable energy, they can very quickly become one of the catalysts for clean energy – empowering the internet and much of the offline world as well. The question that we can’t really know the answer to right now is just what this means and how serious AWS is.”
