AWS renewable credit

[Tyler Christie]

Hi all - I have a question about AWS cloud emissions accounting. Is there any good study someone can share about the validity of renewables uses across the infrastructure?

The issues is I’m hearing a range of opinions on how to account for this — with some saying none of it should be treated as clean energy and on the other hand some fully incorporating what AWS says is green as 100% renewables. The default conservative approach is to rely on regional grid intensity. If that is the case I’d like to be able to better explain to stakeholders why.

We did use the cloud carbon footprint tool which identified the majority of our AWS usage as being green. However when doing our full carbon footprint with a 3rd party they have advised (supposedly informed by GHG-MI) that the AWS renewables claims are not sufficient.
We are happy taking the more conservative position and not counting on the renewable energy credits here. I just would like to get the rationale correct as much as possible.

So if anyone has a more informed viewpoint on this or, ideally, an independent 3rd party analysis, it would be great to hear!

Thanks

Tyler

[David Mytton]

This is an interesting question. It all comes down to how AWS is achieving "100% renewables" because if it's just through unbundled RECs then that isn't sufficient to claim true "100% renewables". RECs are also often used to match on an annual basis but that is very different from matching hourly, which no cloud provider has yet achieved on a global basis. Both Google and Microsoft are making progress, however:

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/new-progress-toward-our-247-carbon-free-energy-goal/

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2021/07/14/made-to-measure-sustainability-commitment-progress-and-updates/

This becomes a bit more confusing because you mention "emissions", which are different from "100% renewables". For example, Google has been carbon neutral for years but they are not using 100% renewables in all regions. The difference is met by offsets. This is shown when you look at the regional breakdown at https://cloud.google.com/sustainability/region-carbon - note that no region uses 100% carbon fee energy but the net carbon emissions are still zero because of the offsets.

So what you probably want to look at is whether the regions you are using are "carbon neutral", which is what AWS claims, rather than "100% renewables". If you can get an answer from AWS on how they achieve this then that will help inform your Scope 3 Market vs Location emissions reporting.

You may be interested in reading a paper I wrote on this: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13677-020-00185-8 and also a report on renewable energy for data centers: https://uptimeinstitute.com/resources/asset/renewable-energy-for-data-centers

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David Mytton

https://davidmytton.blog/start