Some corporations daintily sip power out of tiny porcelain tea cups while others gulp energy from a 2-quart coffee carafe, no serving vessel needed.
Amazon is probably more in the 2-quart carafe model, as it takes a lot of computing power to operate their mail order business while taking care of payroll and all those other business necessities, and that keeps the electric meter spinning.
Amazon Web Services has huge computer power to handle all that, and some of it is crunching all those zeros and ones, in multiple locations in Umatilla and Morrow counties.
“Amazon Web Services has been in Eastern Oregon for a number of years and we’ve invested over $22.9 billion in Morrow and Umatilla counties,” said Shannon Kellogg, Amazon’s vice president of Public Policy for the Americas. “We’re the largest taxpayer in Morrow and Umatilla counties because of the scale of that investment in 2022 alone, an investment that has enabled more than 5,940 jobs locally.”
That’s a big payroll, big computers and huge electrical power consumption.
Wind farm power provider Avangrid announced Feb. 9 that Amazon has made a deal in which Avangrid will provide renewable energy to Amazon to help keep all that computing power online with squeaky-clean power.
Kellogg said the company is proud of not only its history and presence in Eastern Oregon but also its investments to purchase more than 200 megawatt hours of clean energy to power Amazon operations, including AWS data centers.
“That utility-scale wind farm will be Leaning Juniper IIA, a 90-megawatt capacity wind farm in Gilliam County,” Kellogg said. “In addition to that, we’re also investing $1.2 million in a donation to Grid Alternatives, to fund the community solar program in Eastern Oregon, which is just another step in our ongoing commitment to those communities.”
He said the Grid Alternatives solar panel installations will be distributed among public service buildings in both counties, but the consultants have not yet determined where they will be.
Kellogg said Amazon’s energy goals are to be running on 100% renewable energy by 2025 and net zero carbon emissions by 2040.
“We’ve actually had this long-term goal of 100% renewable energy for around a decade,” Kellogg said. “I’ve been working on that my entire tenure at Amazon, and I’ve been here 11.5 years. The goal has been there for quite some time and we’ve made measurable progress toward that goal over this last decade. We’re on schedule.”
He said the original renewable energy goal was set for 2030 but was advanced five years, “because of the number of projects we were able to get into place around the world over this last decade. If you look at the last four years, we’ve actually been the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world.”
Kellogg said the wind farm in Gilliam County will be outfitted with newly-designed more efficient turbine blades, “which will increase the efficiency and production at the wind farm and as a result we’ll be creating additional local jobs as we make that investment.”
The existing blades can be recycled, rather than hauled to a landfill, he said.
Kellogg said the Amazon clean energy investment will benefit local restaurants, convenience stores and local employers and plenty of electrical workers.
“These investments in Oregon, both with the renewable energy investments as well as historically with the data center investments, are creating a lot of local jobs,” he said, “not just direct jobs, but also jobs in the community.”
