2.
Bringing a renewable project online requires more than just cool, new technology. It’s also about the right economics, regulations, and policies.
Renewable energy is about more than solar farms that can be built on top of fisheries or awe-inspiring rows of wind turbines along a horizon. It’s also about dollars and cents, such as tariffs and contracts—in other words, who can buy what, from whom, for how much, and who pays for it? Aside from the physical infrastructure that transports energy from the wind farm where it’s generated to the grid, we must navigate a system of regulations, state and federal laws, and rates. These laws and regulations can vary from state to state, and some areas may not have a system in place to accommodate renewables at scale.
Take Virginia, where AWS, and the entire data center industry, has its largest presence in the world. We worked with regulators and utilities to create a new tariff structure for corporate companies to be able to buy clean energy directly from renewable energy projects, where such structures previously didn’t exist. Once a tariff like that is set up, it’s open to other large customers, unlocking opportunities for other companies to follow suit. In eastern Oregon, we recently partnered with Umatilla Electric Cooperative—the utility serving our data centers in the area—to create a first-of-its-kind deal structure in the state that allows us to take on the responsibility of selecting the energy supply that powers our data centers, including from renewable energy sources. By creating a new structure where we can select our own power supply, and buy more renewable energy than we might have received under the previous arrangement, we’re showing other companies and organizations that staying on path to meeting sustainability commitments is possible everywhere.