E-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc’s overall emissions fell 3 percent last year as the company met a goal for all of the electricity it consumes globally to be matched with renewable power, it said yesterday.
Amazon has a goal to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2040 and in 2019 set a target to match 100 percent of its electricity consumption with renewable power by 2030, which it has now met.
The company’s total emissions were 68.82 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent last year, down from 70.74 million tonnes the previous year, Amazon said in its annual sustainability report.
Photo: Reuters
Amazon’s total emissions include those generated from its supply chain, third-party logistics and purchased electricity.
Emissions from the company’s direct operations, rose 7 percent to 14.27 million tonnes, which Amazon said was due to an increase in the number of packages delivered by its in-house logistics team and overall business growth. This figure also includes its data centers.
“We know generative AI requires a lot of computing power. To power this demand while still progressing toward our climate goals, we’ll need different sources of energy than we’d originally projected,” Amazon Worldwide Carbon director Chris Roe said in e-mail.
Amazon invested in 112 new renewable projects last year and is the largest corporate purchaser of renewable electricity in the world, Bloomberg NEF research shows.
The company said it also sometimes purchases renewable energy credits to bridge the gap between the time a renewable energy project is being built and when operations begin. It did not say how many were used to meet the target.
To date, Amazon has invested in more than 500 wind and solar projects globally representing 28 gigawatts of capacity, it said.
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