Amazon Web Services toward reducing Carbon Emissions

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As Amazon claims, they currently have more than 234 solar and wind energy projects throughout the world, including projects in Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the UK. Together, these projects will provide over 10,000 MW of global renewable energy capacity when complete.
They are inviting organizations to join The Climate Pledge, a commitment to becoming net-zero carbon by 2040, 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement. Co-founded by Amazon, more than 200 organizations have signed so far The Climate Pledge, committing to use their scale to decarbonize the economy through real business change and innovation.

Great! How renewable energy further reduces carbon emissions?
451 Research, a global research firm found that if a 1-megawatt corporate data center (about 1,000 square meters, at an assumed 30% electrical utilization rate) switches their applications to the cloud, they could reduce emissions by about 1,079 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. This is equivalent to removing over 500 cars from the roads or offsetting the annual electricity emissions of over 50 average households across Europe. That number rises to as much as 1,293 metric tons of carbon dioxide when a cloud provider is powered by 100% renewable energy. AWS is on path to achieve 100% renewable energy by 2025.

451 Research also find out and AWS commissioned that, migrating compute workloads to AWS across Europe could decrease greenhouse gas emissions equal to the footprint of millions of households. In addition, businesses could potentially reduce carbon emissions of an average workload by up to 96% when AWS reaches its goal of purchasing 100% of its energy from renewable sources.
And how? They surveyed senior stakeholders at over 300 companies across a broad range of industries in France, Germany, Ireland, Spain, and Sweden operating their own data centers. Results show that companies in Europe can reduce their energy use by almost 80% by moving their compute workloads out of on-premises data centers to AWS. Companies could potentially further reduce carbon emissions from an average workload – by up to 96% – once AWS meets its goal to be powered by 100% renewable energy. And compared to the computing resources of the average European company, cloud servers are roughly three times more energy efficient, and AWS data centers are up to five times more energy efficient. In fact, moving a megawatt (MW) of a typical compute workload from a European organization’s data center to AWS Cloud could reduce carbon emissions by up to 1,079 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.
Kelly Morgan, Research Director, Datacenter Infrastructure & Services at 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence said; We were struck by how much opportunity there is for European businesses to increase energy efficiency and reduce emissions by looking at their IT infrastructure. If you think of the electricity consumed and emissions produced by tens of thousands of companies across Europe operating their own data centers, this is an area that appears to be overlooked.

We can conclude that, cloud data centers are efficient because cloud providers focus on sustainability across their entire operation. In contrast, most businesses don’t prioritize their data center infrastructure sustainability, which means their data centers are not optimized for efficiency. Most businesses don’t prioritize addressing data center energy costs and carbon emissions because digital infrastructure is not their core business. Cloud providers focus on efficiency as a best practice. They operate servers at much higher utilization rates and design facilities to use less energy and water. Overall, the AWS Cloud infrastructure is up to five times more energy efficient than typical EU enterprise infrastructure. AWS achieves lower energy use in its data centers through designing cooling systems that reduce energy and water use, and using real-time sensor data to adapt to changing weather conditions. AWS’s scale enables high resource usage, and its global cloud infrastructure is built using Amazon’s own custom hardware, purpose-built and optimized for workloads run by AWS customers. This includes power-efficient processors like Graviton 2, the ARM-based AWS – designed chip that provides better performance per watt than any other Elastic Compute processor.

How it can affect and change the current situation?
AWS has responsibilities to the communities where they operate, and to them, that means sustainability and environmental stewardship. AWS is continuously working on ways to increase the energy efficiency of facilities and equipment, as well as innovating the design and manufacture of servers, storage, and networking equipment to reduce resource use and limit waste.

Resource: 451 Research report

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