Amazon Receives ACORE’s Corporate Innovation and Leadership Award in Renewable Energy

At last night’s American Council on Renewable Energy’s (ACORE) 15th Anniversary Gala in Washington D.C, Amazon received the Corporate Innovation and Industry Leadership Award in recognition of Amazon’s commitment to renewable energy. Spanning retail, devices, media, cloud computing and more, Amazon is pioneering new products and services on behalf of customers to build a more sustainable world.

Amazon has a broad push for renewable energy across the business and is a corporate member of ACORE, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the renewable energy sector through market development, policy changes, and financial innovation.

Accepting the ACORE award on behalf of Amazon was Teresa Carlson, Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector for Amazon Web Services.

“At Amazon, we are putting our scale and our inventive culture to work on sustainability and protecting our environment, said Teresa. “We are honored to receive the award and looking forward to continuing to innovate and deliver on our commitment to running our business in the most environmentally friendly way possible.”

Amazon and Sustainability

Amazon is a company of builders, and we have been at work building innovative, sustainable solutions for our business.

Amazon is undertaking several clean energy initiatives across the company. Examples of our projects include a 253 MW wind farm – our largest to date – in Scurry County, TX, wind and solar farms in four states to add renewable energy to the electrical grids that supply AWS data centers, green rooftops for our corporate offices, rooftop solar installations across 50 of our fulfillment centers by 2020, and the District Energy Project that uses recycled energy for heating offices in Seattle. Learn more about these projects here.

In addition to the environmental benefits inherently associated with running applications in the cloud, AWS has made a lot of progress towards the long-term commitment to power the global AWS infrastructure with 100% renewable energy. We exceeded our goal of 40% renewable energy by the end of 2016, and we have set a new goal to be powered by 50% renewable energy by the end of 2017.

AWS has funded ten wind and solar PPAs to increase the overall amount of renewable energy available on the grids that serve AWS data centers. These ten renewable energy projects will deliver more than 2.6 million MWh of renewable energy annually into the electric grids that supply current and future AWS Cloud data centers in Virginia and Ohio. The electricity produced from these projects is enough to power the equivalent of nearly 240,000 U.S. homes annually.

Learn more about how AWS is working to achieve its goal of 100% renewable energy usage for our global infrastructure footprint and learn more about Amazon’s sustainability efforts here.