TotalEnergies, a French oil giant has signed a major power purchase agreement with Amazon to supply their data centres with 100% renewable electricity, Amazon will help speed up the oil giant’s digitization
A ‘green’ data centre on the Port of Strasbourg, France. Credit: Michael Kauffmann, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
TotalEnergies, a French oil giant has signed a major power purchase agreement with Amazon to supply their data centres with 100% renewable electricity. TotalEnergies has committed to supply 474MW of carbon-free energy to Amazon’s data centres in Europe and North America. In return, Amazon will provide its data management services to help speed up the oil giant’s digitization using its Digital Factory platform.
Amazon operates almost 40 data centres around the world. It has clusters in Virginia and Oregon in America, and centres in Dublin, Germany and the UK. By certain estimates, data centres around the world consume 2% of the planet’s electricity. This rate is expected to double by 2030. Meanwhile, Amazon has committed to power its operations only by renewable energy by the end of this decade.
TotalEnergies has been busy moving away from its oil and gas corporation image to being more sustainable-friendly. In May this year, it rebranded itself as TotalEnergies and committed to creating assets to generate 12GW energy using renewable sources by 2025. When 2020 ended, 7GW of TotalEnergies’ global energy capacity of 12GW was from renewable sources. By the end of this decade, the oil giant has committed to pushing this figure up to 100GW. If they are successful, the accomplishment will make TotalEnergies the top 5 power generators in the world.
The oil corporation has been under pressure to transition away from its traditional focus on fossil fuels towards more sustainable energy alternatives. Despite its image makeover it still derives over 90% of its revenue from fossil fuels. In 2017, Total was considered to be among the world’s top 100 carbon emission generators. Stéphane Michel, TotalEnergies’ President for Gas, Renewables and Power said: “TotalEnergies is deeply committed to reducing the carbon emissions of its operations and supporting its customers to do the same around the world. By signing this agreement, we are proud to enter into this key collaboration with Amazon and to accompany them on their journey to carbon neutrality.”
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