Amazon to Source Green Electricity from Japanese Firm Itochu

Global ecommerce and cloud storage giant Amazon will be sourcing green energy from Clean Energy Connect through Japanese trading house Itochu for its operations. Itochu will be developing renewable energy supply networks for the purpose in Japan and America.

It will also supply green power to Meta and other companies in Japan and USA to help them decarbonise data centers and other facilities.

As per reports, solar power company Clean Energy Connect (CEC), which is also a part of the Itochu group, has inked a corporate power purchase agreement (cPPA) to sell renewable energy to Amazon for 20 years.

Reports hold that Amazon will buy green power at a fixed price. Itochu will have investment in the power plant.

In the scheme of things, CEC will be investing more than 10 billion yen in the construction of small solar power projects for Amazon. The solar installations will come up in about 700 locations in Japan by 2024  that will generate about 38,000 kilowatts of green energy. The cPPA with Amazon is expected to be one of the largest in Japan till date.

Itochu will employ the existing power grids to supply power to the data centers and distribution centers of Amazon.

Data centres are one of the most electricity intensive installations in the modern world. Hence, CEC will be developing small solar plants at 5,000 suited sites in Japan by the 2025 financial year.

Amazon is aiming at decarbonizing its business by switching to renewable energy by the middle of this decade. In a recent revelation, the company said that it has secured over 20 million kW of green electricity in 22 countries. It claims to have added over 8 million kW in 2022 alone.

The International Energy Agency says that power usage in data centers has risen from 200 billion kWh in 2015 to about 320 billion kWh in 2021 across the world.

Microsoft signed a 15-year agreement with AES Corporation to support the software company to employ around-the-clock renewable energy for its data centers in Virginia.

Technology firm PubMatic announced recently that all of its global data centers are now powered by 100% renewable energy.