With New Solar Farm, Amazon Environment Director Defends Climate Commitment

Retail giant Amazon recently completed its first grid-scale solar farm with battery storage. The Baldy Mesa project near San Bernardino also boasts a control system that uses artificial intelligence to manage the flow of clean energy from California's Mojave Desert to Amazon's operations and beyond.

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"It's one of the largest solar-power storage projects in California," Amazon's Environment Director Chris Roe told Newsweek in a wide-ranging interview about climate action by the world's largest online retailer. "It allows us to send carbon-free power back to the grid and to our operations at all times, even when the sun is not shining."

Baldy Mesa is one of 10 solar-plus-storage projects Amazon is developing in California and Arizona with nearly 1.5 gigawatts of combined battery storage capacity.

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The projects are part of Amazon's work toward a climate goal to be net zero for carbon emissions across its operations by 2040 and to match all its electricity use with renewable energy by 2030.

Next month marks 30 years since Jeff Bezos founded Amazon as an online bookseller, and it has since grown into one of the world's largest companies. In addition to the familiar delivery vehicles and giant "fulfillment center" warehouses, Amazon's subsidiaries include the Whole Foods grocery chain and a fleet of data centers to support its web services, all of which require massive amounts of energy.

Amazon ranks second among retailers on Newsweek's list of the Most Trustworthy Companies in America and fifth in the retail sector on Newsweek's list of the World's Most Trustworthy Companies. But despite being the world's largest purchaser of clean energy since 2020, Amazon has come under fire for halting progress toward reducing its greenhouse gas emissions.

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Last year, the independent climate pledge verification group Science Based Targets initiative removed Amazon from its list of companies that are "credibly working toward" net-zero emissions.

Roe, a mechanical engineer with degrees from Cambridge University and the University of Washington, defended the company's climate progress and described how Amazon is working to meet growing demand for electricity to power data centers. He also explained his approach to sustainability leadership, which includes an emphasis on partnerships and, as he put it, learning the value of a "good no."

Newsweek: I want to start with the Baldy Mesa project. Tell me more about the importance of energy storage and what that allows you to do.

Roe: With intermittent resources like wind and sun, storage is really an important tool and an asset to effectively be a battery to help the grid decarbonize. And so, there's a lot of data points that come out of this and that's the other angle that we're really excited about—using machine learning and AI. This system will process about 30 billion data points a year. So, way, way more than we were able to process manually five to 10 years ago. This allows us to optimize the system itself to know what times of day when it's most advantageous to the grid to lower carbon emissions and send power back when we need it most.

I want to talk a little more specifically about data centers. The Electric Power Research Institute just came out with some projections that by 2030, data centers in the U.S. could be using up to 9 percent of all electricity production in the country, which is a pretty astonishing jump and apparently a lot of that's related to the increase in demand for AI. How is Amazon approaching that?

I haven't seen that particular EPRI study, but it's no surprise. Data centers do use power. And I think as we grow, we're looking for ways to complement that with carbon-free sources to the grid to meet that load demand. One example recently in the last few weeks, we announced a large investment in Mississippi—the largest capital investment in the state's history, actually—as part of that growth in data centers, we are also partnering with the local utilities and policymakers and regulators to drive new clean energy to the grid. In this case, in Mississippi, [we're] partnering with the energy utility for 650 megawatts of new wind and solar over the next three years, which we're really proud of.

I think the flip side of the conversation that's super important to talk about and we're just getting started, is understanding the power of AI and ML [machine learning] to really drive grid decarbonization down. We have a lot of examples that are emerging around the use of AI and ML like the project in California to optimize the output of these systems. But another example that we're really proud of is an AWS [Amazon Web Services] customer named Greenko in India has onboarded their fleet of about 2,200 wind turbines onto the AWS cloud. That's now using machine learning to optimize the amount of renewable energy and carbon-free power sent back into the grid to decarbonize power in India.

Those are solutions that we would not have been able to do without AI and without the power of ML. So, we're really bullish and excited about it.

It is a curious dynamic, isn't it? It's AI that appears to be driving a lot of the increased need for electricity, but it's also AI that's helping us figure out how to be smarter about how we use that power. Is AI going to prove out here as a climate hero or a climate villain? What do you think?

We're certainly very optimistic and we're just getting started. We're imagining what's possible here and we're just scratching the surface. So, I would definitely put ourselves in the climate hero camp.

Give me a sense of Amazon's energy need. I mean, it's hard to wrap your head around just how much power it takes to operate a company of that size.

Well, we are a complicated company. We cover a lot of surface area, we have thousands of buildings across the world and increasingly electric fleets of vehicles for last-mile deliveries. We're on path to get 100,000 [electric] vehicles on the road in the U.S., and we have over 13,000 already deployed. So, we're seeing power needs across the company, and we're still committed to reach 100 percent renewable energy by 2025.

To put that in context, it's about 28 gigawatts to date of new renewable energy, which is about the equivalent of 7 million U.S. homes.

And where does the bulk of the energy demand come from? Is it the data centers and the fulfillment centers and the physical operations? Is it the familiar vans and trucks with the Amazon logo?

Today our buildings represent the majority of our power consumption. But you look at Amazon, we have data centers, we operate grocery stores, Whole Foods, corporate offices, fulfillment centers all around the world. We don't talk generally about exact energy use projections across the entire company but right now our buildings are the primary source of power consumption.

And what about the supply chain and the value chain? As I understand it, for most companies, the bulk of their emissions are in what is called Scope 3 along the supply chain. I'm assuming that's the case for Amazon as well. How are you addressing that?

Yeah, that's exactly right. Over 70 percent of Amazon's emissions are in our Scope 3, or outside of our four walls, with our suppliers. And last year, we made an announcement that we are going to be working on suppliers much more directly to work with them to figure out ways that we can partner to reduce emissions together—and you're going to hear from us in the next several months around what we're going to be asking of our suppliers more directly.

These are complicated problems, so it's going to take a lot of collaborative effort and that's really the spirit behind the climate pledge itself. You know, when we set out to set our net-zero target in 2019, we realized that Amazon alone was not nearly as powerful as Amazon collaborating with our supply chain and partners and other companies around the world.

The talk about targets and work to meet the targets, it sounds great, but I think for a lot of our readers, the bottom line is, well, where are emissions? Are emissions for Amazon going up or coming down?

Well, we always work backward from the science. And when we set up our target in 2019, it's net zero by 2040, that was 10 years ahead of [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] IPCC's report saying we need to hit net zero by 2050 to comply with the 1.5 degree [Celsius] scenario. That's our anchor.

For the last couple of years, our emissions have held flat or slightly reduced. I don't think our progress will be linear. We have a lot of activity that is going to take time to mature and it's going to take a lot of new innovations. So, we'll see a lot of sectoral movements. For example, as we electrify our energy we use, we will move away from Scope 1 fossil fuels and into Scope 2, and our electricity use.

We see that as a good thing because those changes across sectors allow us to decarbonize faster. And once we actually move into an electrified future, we're able to look at clean-energy sources that allow us to reduce emissions as a whole, not just for Amazon, but in support of global climate targets.

I see what you're saying: If you're going to electrify a large fleet, obviously your emissions associated with the electricity are going to go up. But it's because you're working to ditch the direct consumption of liquid fossil fuels, right?

That's exactly right. We're trying to find ways to move our emissions into pathways where we have solutions today that we can scale and make use of.

OK. But year over year, where are your emissions?

Well, this last year, we had a slight decrease in overall emissions, but we had a growth in emissions during the pandemic to meet customer demand, as you might expect, and we've now seen that taper off. I'm really, really proud of the work that we've done over the last couple of years to curb that.

But, as I said, it's not going to be a linear path to 2040. We have to figure out ways to decarbonize aviation, decarbonize the middle-mile transportation, steel, concrete—these are really tough problems that Amazon's not going to be able to solve alone.

One of the things that we've done is establish an innovation fund called the Climate Pledge Fund. It's a $2 billion investment fund to think about the promising technologies and new solutions that are out there that we can help.

These won't be available overnight, so we don't think we're going to have progress year over year perfectly. But I think planting those seeds and helping them mature and develop will allow us over time to take the output of those investments and make sure that we're taking every opportunity that's available at scale for Amazon to decarbonize.

So, I want to talk about this group Science Based Targets initiative. They're an independent verification organization that looks at climate plans and climate action by companies and sort of gives a stamp of approval. Last year, SBTi removed Amazon from its list of companies that were taking credible action to meet their climate commitments. Why did that happen? Why did they take you off the list, and what is Amazon doing in response?

Yeah, great question. So SBTi has been an amazing force to really galvanize science-based work across many sectors. Amazon covers a lot of surface area as part of a lot of sectors that, right now, there are no methodologies SBTi has that work for the complexity of our business. So when we realized that, we said great, let's continue to work together to continue to refine those methodologies and understanding so that it does cover, over time, the complexity of Amazon's operations. But until then, we're not waiting. We've been working on other kinds of science-based approaches that have come out from the climate science community to figure out how we can work backward from the targets, even when the industry isn't quite ready for the complexity of Amazon's business.

So, are you working to get back on SBTi's list, or is their methodology just not an appropriate fit for Amazon?

We continue to partner with SBTi and others on this. We're working really hard on figuring out how we bring our internal science to the forefront to help us do the math and understand exactly the translation between global climate science and our operations. And I think it's an opportunity for us to continue to work with SBTi. They've been a really important vehicle for change, but we also don't think there's just one way to think about climate science. It is a very complex endeavor.

Are there other independent organizations that verify your progress toward meeting your climate goals?

Every year, we do an independent audit and assurance process with a third-party validator to look at our footprint and look at our math and ensure that it aligns to the standards.

And just circling back briefly to the data centers and energy use, is there the threat that this growth in anticipated energy demand might throw us off the trajectory toward decarbonization?

The world's goals to hit net zero are not optional. We must do this as a society. I think moving into a more electrified future is really, really important and it gives us opportunities to actually decarbonize as power demand increases. We're pretty optimistic about the future, and the global climate science has been very clear: We need to act now.

I also want to hear a bit about you. Tell me a little bit about your pathway to where you are.

Well, I started off as a mechanical engineer and discovered very quickly that I love the intersection of a lot of different things rather than diving deep on one particular thing. And as I started my career in energy and engineering, I realized the intersection with policy and finance and economics was really, really exciting. And since then, I've been able to work in the corporate setting and think about how we find ways that really drive solutions to the heart of our problems.

And what advice do you have for other people who are in sustainability or environmental management positions?

I think, never let a good "no" go to waste. A lot of the challenges around here are hard, and we're not going to have solutions that are just over night. But understanding the blockers and asking, "Why?" like four times and listening with big ears will allow us to really digest and understand pathways to solutions.

Is that a common saying, "Never let a good 'no' go to waste," or is that a Chris Roe-ism?

That's just you and I riffing here, Jeff. [Laughs.]

Sustainability is about endurance, it's the long game. And I think we need to have that patient model of way-finding to get to a yes, figuring out, what is the science block here? What is the reason that our financial teams are concerned about this? What are ways that we can work with legal and accounting and our technologists to find ways to move together?

And that doesn't come with a "yes" the first time. It often comes with, "I have concerns about this." And those concerns are really important for way-finding toward solutions.