Cloud sustainability: Amazon employees question firm’s renewable energy claims

‘Creative accounting’

According to the group, Amazon’s renewable energy milestone has been achieved using “creative accounting” and, despite what the company claims, the way it runs its operations is unsustainable.

“A company that runs millions of diesel truck trips through working class neighbourhoods and playgrounds and has datacentres using more energy than entire cities should not claim it is doing a great job by achieving a 100% renewable goal (using creative accounting),” said a representative from the group, in a statement to Computer Weekly.

“Amazon needs to get real about its progress – until every Amazon truck you see rolling down highways is electric, until every datacentre, including the ones in Virginia and Saudi Arabia, is using renewable energy 24/7, then the company’s operations aren’t sustainable, regardless of whichever energy trading scheme the company chooses.”

The AECJ group published its Burns Trust: The Amazon unsustainability report on the same day this year’s Amazon global sustainability report dropped, and it digs a little deeper into the issues its employees have with the company’s renewable energy strategy.

“When we look at the locations in the US where Amazon actually operates its datacentres, we estimate Amazon only gets 22% renewable energy from the local utilities in those regions,” the report stated. “And it is investing in datacentre expansion in locations heavily dependent on oil, gas and coal – like Northern Virginia and Saudi Arabia.

“How can Amazon claim that its operations are powered by 90% renewable energy when the renewable energy projects it is responsible for don’t actually power its operations?”

Amazon response

Computer Weekly asked Amazon to respond to the contents of the AECJ’s report, including its claims the company’s renewable energy progress is not all it seems, and received the following statement in response.

“Amazon’s Sustainability report has the correct data, transparent published methodologies and third-party assurance,” said an Amazon spokesperson.

“The [AECJ] paper you’re referring [to] has incorrect findings and assumptions, likely because, as its authors admit, it’s based on data and opinion from outside the company.”

The last bit of that statement is a description the members of AECJ would take issue with, given the group’s statement goes on to emphasise that its members’ opinions are based on having inside knowledge of the company’s inner workings.

“We’re Amazon’s own employees who build these businesses and we don’t accept Amazon’s propaganda that massively overstate the progress the company has made,” the AECJ statement continued. “Amazon’s customers and regulators should not accept these claims either.”

AWS under scrutiny

The AECJ are not the only ones who have taken issue with the contents of Amazon’s sustainability report, with Mark Butcher, founder and director of IT sustainability consultancy Posetiv Cloud, among the IT sustainability experts to call the document’s conclusions into question.

In a blog post on professional social media site LinkedIn, he said the fact the report does not provide a separate breakdown of the greenhouse gas emissions generated solely by its public cloud arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is a concern.

The company has produced a summary document of AWS’s contributions to the company’s overall environmental footprint, but it lacks specific details on the Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions generated solely by AWS.

And for that reason, Amazon’s environmental report (and the accompanying summary of the work underway at AWS to reduce its carbon emissions) is of limited value to IT buyers, said Butcher.

Particularly as the publication of Amazon’s environmental report comes hot on the heels of similar publications from Microsoft and Google, which saw both firms disclose an uptick in their total GHG emissions, attributed to their growing datacentre footprint.

“AWS numbers are still hidden amidst the corporate Amazon totals,” he said. “These numbers cannot and should not – in my honest opinion – be used to compare against their competitors. They are not granular, nor meaningful.”

Emissions decrease

What the Amazon 2023 environmental report does state, however, is that the company’s total carbon emissions decreased by 3% compared with 2022, with the firm reporting an 11% year-on-year reduction in Scope 2 emissions and a further 5% fall in Scope 3 emissions, too. Its Scope 1 emissions, however, increased by 7% over the same period.

Even so, Butcher’s view is that Amazon’s sole reliance on “market-based methods” when calculating its Scope 2 and Scope 3 GHG emissions does not give an accurate account of the company’s total environmental footprint anyway.

“[Its] Scope 2 [emissions are] market-based and not location-based – and organisations should do both. [If they included] location-based data [its emissions] would be massively, massively higher,” he said.

The company’s Scope 3 emissions are also “spend-based estimates” which, according to Butcher, means there is no way of knowing if this data is correct. “This approach means the data cannot be really used to drive decisions,” he added.

And that’s not the only issue AWS customers have with the company and its approach to Scope 3 emissions.

As previously reported by Computer Weekly, AWS has come in for criticism in the past for the fact that the tool it built and made available to its customers so they could track the carbon emissions generated by their use of its cloud services does not include Scope 3 contributions.

The company previously advised Computer Weekly that this functionality would be added to its Customer Carbon Footprint Tracking Tool in early 2024, but – at the time of writing – no updates to the tool of this nature have been forthcoming.

It is understood the company is in the throes of carrying out the necessary life-cycle assessments required to generate Scope 3 emissions data for incorporation into the Customer Carbon Footprint Tool. But there is no indication as of yet when that work will be complete.

Adrian Cockcroft, who served as the vice-president of sustainability architecture at AWS until June 2022, and now heads up the Green Software Foundation’s Real Time Cloud project, has blogged about his thoughts on the continued lack of Scope 3 data being made available to AWS customers.

“The AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool was embarrassing when it was initially released, and it has made no progress in the years since then,” he wrote. “They’ve told me they have a team working on it, but until something is released, this is a huge gap.

“The [Amazon Exchange Carbon Measurement Guide] guidance says that metrics and transparency are needed, and AWS is still at ground zero, with no transparency, and no progress on metrics that their customers have been asking for for years.”

Computer Weekly asked Amazon for clarity on when the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool might be updated, but the company did not directly answer the question.