Amazon and ACCIONA announced today two different agreements to cooperate in reaching decarbonization goals and accelerating innovation. ACCIONA will provide clean energy to Amazon in the United States with the electrical production corresponding to 641MW, helping meet Amazon’s company-wide goal to use 100% renewable energy by 2030 and achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2040. Additionally, Amazon Web Services (AWS) will become ACCIONA’s ‘preferred cloud provider’ to gain operational efficiencies, unlock data-driven insights and accelerate its pace of innovation.
To help power Amazon’s operations with a long-term Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), ACCIONA will build four new photovoltaic plants in Illinois, Kentucky and Ohio, with a total capacity of 889MWp. ACCIONA will invest close to US$1 billion (€835 million) over the next four years to develop these new projects.
These new assets come under ACCIONA’s growth strategy to install 5GW of new renewable energy capacity worldwide between 2020 and 2024. The company currently has a total installed capacity of over 10.5GW in sixteen countries.
“These four new projects with Acciona help us toward our goal of powering our operations with 100% renewable energy,” said Nat Sahlstrom, Director, Amazon Energy. “Acciona’s sizeable projects enable us to add more than 640MW of renewable power to the grid. Our push for more renewable energy is one more step toward our goal of reaching net-zero carbon by 2040 as part of Amazon’s commitment to The Climate Pledge.”
“We are very pleased to see companies like Amazon making an unequivocal commitment to the fight against climate change and to the decarbonization of its business activity. Our goal is to offer the maximum support possible through our core strengths as a company, in this case by supplying clean photovoltaic energy to Amazon in the US,” said Rafael Mateo, CEO of ACCIONA’s clean energy business.
ACCIONA supplies 100% renewable energy to over 500 companies and institutions worldwide, contributing to strategies focused on decarbonization and climate mitigation. ACCIONA’s clients include Novartis, Telefónica, Apple, Bimbo, Merck, Falabella, Asics, Unilever, Maersk and Robert Bosch.
With 10.5GW of renewable energy capacity in sixteen countries, ACCIONA’s clean energy output is plenty to power more than seven million households worldwide. ACCIONA is “the world’s greenest electricity generation company,” according to Energy Intelligence’s “New Energy Top 100 Green Utilities” ranking; the company has been at the top of the annual ranking since 2015. ACCIONA has also been recognized as the leading company in the electric utilities sector according to the analysis carried out for the development of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI). ACCIONA is carbon neutral since 2016.
In addition, as part of its digital transformation project, ACCIONA has chosen AWS as its ‘preferred cloud provider’ to initiate its shift towards the “Cloud First” paradigm.
For that purpose, ACCIONA will work with AWS in two main areas. The company will migrate eight business-critical enterprise IT applications to the AWS cloud, including three SAP modules, as well as its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, which integrates accounting, finance, human resources, knowledge management, and intranet applications. To improve its data governance and to develop a new data architecture, ACCIONA will also build a data lake on AWS with a new taxonomy, to continue the path to a real data-driven company.
