Amazon Web Services' Efforts Toward Green Computing

Koti Vinod Babu
Research Associate, IBS Case Research Center, IBS Hyderabad (Under IFHE - A Deemed to be University u/s 3 of the UGC Act, 1956), Hyderabad, Telangana, India. E-mail: vinodbabu@icmrindia.org

Namratha V Prasad
Faculty Associate, IBS Case Research Center, IBS Hyderabad (Under IFHE - A Deemed to be University u/s 3 of the UGC Act, 1956), Hyderabad, Telangana, India. E-mail: v.namratha.prasad@icmrindia.org

The case discusses the ef forts made by leading cloud service provider Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. (Amazon), to adopt green computing practices in its operations. The case starts out by going into the reasons for the high level of carbon emissions attributed to the data centers of many cloud platforms that include a rapid addition of capacity and usage of power from dirty energy sources. The case then provides an overview of the green computing practices undertaken by AWS through power purchase agreements with producers of renewable energy and usage of equipment to boost energy efficiency at its data centers. Though different Information Technology (IT) companies have taken up many activities to reduce their carbon footprint, it is believed that each one of them, including AWS, has a long way to go to become completely green. While Jef f Bezos (Bezos), Founder and CEO of Amazon, was confident that the green computing measures deployed by AWS were contributing to environmental sustainability to a high extent, non-governmental environmental organizations such as Greenpeace begged to dif fer. Can Bezos continue showcasing the current green computing measures of AWS to stave of f pressure from not only Greenpeace, but also his employees in the long term? Or will he be forced to do more?

In addition to the environmental benefits inherently associated with running applications in the cloud, investing in renewable energy is a critical step toward addressing our carbon footprint¹ globally.²

- Kara Hurst, Vice-President of Su st ainability
at Amazon.com, Inc. in March 2020

? Alex Eaton,
Co-founder of Sistema Biobolsa

Introduction
On March 12, 2020, US-based multinational technology company Amazon.com, Inc., (Amazon)³ announced four new renewable energy projects in Australia, Spain, Sweden, and the US that would power the data centers of Amazon's subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS). These projects were also expected to support Amazon's commitment to reaching 80% renewable energy by 2024 and 100% renewable energy by 2030, on its path to achieving net zero⁴ carbon emissions by 2040.⁵

Major tech companies such as Amazon had taken such steps to reduce their carbon footprint by installing green energy infrastructure to power their operations. The four projects constituted Amazon's first renewable energy project in Australia, second in Sweden, second in Spain, and 11th in the US. Collectively, they were expected to produce almost 300 MegaWatt (MW)⁶ of additional renewable capacity and approximately 840,000 MegaWatt hour (MWh)⁷ of energy annually, or enough to power more than 76,000 average US homes.⁸

Globally, Amazon had 86 renewable energy projects that had the capacity to generate over 2,300 MW and deliver more than 6.3 million MWh of energy annually. Kara Hurst (Hurst), Vice-President of Amazon Sustainability, said, "These new renewable energy projects are part of our road map to 80% renewable energy by 2024 and 100% renewable energy by 2030. In addition to the environmental benefits inherently associated with running applications in the cloud, investing in renewable energy is a critical step toward addressing our carbon footprint globally."⁹

For several years previously, Amazon had been taking measures to reduce its carbon footprint to be a part of the global endeavor to arrest climate change. Its various actions included enabling renewable energy projects, taking up innovation at its facilities, and increasing usage of equipment to boost energy efficiency.

The company was especially keen on implementing these measures at the AWS data centers, as the Interna tion al Energy Agency¹⁰ estimated that data centers consumed about 1% of the ''s entire electricity supply-and as more and more critical processes became digitized, it was exp ected to on ly increase fur ther.¹¹ Consequently, instead of using fuel, AWS began using green energy such as wind, hydro, or solar power as a component of its energy resources.

However, environmental organization Greenpeace¹² criticized the operations of AWS saying that it was not doing much for environmental wellbeing and it was not open in its actions for green computing. Can Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos (Bezos) prove through his actions that AWS was keen on reducing the carbon footprint of its operations, especially at its data centers?

About Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Launched in July 2002, AWS was a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. (Amazon) that offered on-demand cloud computing platforms to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, companies could access technology services such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like AWS.

These services were operated from massive data centers located around the '. AWS divided its data centers by 'regions' and 'availability zones'. Its servers were spread across 12 regions 'wide, each with availability zones consisting of one or more data centers. Each AWS region was a separate geographic area, like EU (London) or US West (Oregon). AWS offered 175 fully featured services from its data centers globally.

In November 2004, the first AWS service was launched for public usage. It was called Simple Queue Service¹³ (SQS). Thereafter, the Vice-President of IT infrastructure, Chris Pinkham, and Lead Developer, Christopher Brown, developed the EC2, which went on to become highly popular. Another popular service was the Amazon Simple Storage Service¹⁴ (Amazon S3).

AWS primarily served client-side applications. According to Amazon, as of 2019, the number of active AWS users exceeded 1,000,000.¹⁵ AWS's customers included the fastest-growing start-ups, the largest enterprises, and leading government agencies. AWS provided customers access to Amazon's technology infrastructure so that they could leverage it for any type of business. It offered services for a broad range of applications including networking, analytics, machine learning, and Artificial Intelligence (AI),¹⁶ apart from security, application development, deployment, and management (see Exhibit I).

AWS was developed using a combination of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS),¹⁷ Platform as a Service (PaaS),¹⁸ and packaged Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. While SaaS was the largest cloud service in terms of spend, IaaS was projected to be

the fastest growing market with a CAGR of 20% plus over the next 3 to 4 years¹⁹ (see Exhibit II). According to Statistica,²⁰ AWS had a market share of 47.8% in the IaaS sector, along with a share of 25.2% in the PaaS arena as of January 2020.

AWS's net sales amounted to $35 bn for the year-ended December 31, 2019 (see Exhibit III).²¹ In terms of revenue, AWS dominated the public cloud market with revenue growing at 35% as of Q3 2019.

Position of AWS in the Public Cloud Space
The benefit of using cloud computing services was that firms could avoid the upfront costs and difficulties of owning and maintaining their own IT infrastructure, and pay instead for just what they used and when they used it. The growing demand for cloud services indicated that companies were letting go of their own data centers and moving their application workloads to the cloud. Customers used AWS to lower costs, become more agile toward research, and innovate faster.

Companies like AWS, Google Cloud Platform,²² and Microsoft Azure²³ were the primary players in the industry. According to the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA)²⁴ report, AWS was the most popular public cloud²⁵ infrastructure platform, comprising 41.5% of application workloads in the public cloud (see Exhibit IV). Public cloud providers such as AWS needed to adhere to strict compliance protocols and maintain industry-compliant cloud infrastructure such as HIPAA and PCI-DSS standards.

About Green Computing
Green computing or Green IT referred to practices and technologies for designing, manufacturing, using and disposing of computers, servers, and associated devices such as monitors, printers, storage devices, and networking and communication systems to minimize impact on the environment.²⁶ As of 2020, Information Technology (IT)-related activities were believed to contribute to about 2% of the ''s greenhouse gases.²⁷

Analysts felt that reducing power consumption was a high green computing priority. As companies deployed hundreds or thousands of servers, huge amounts of power were required to operate and cool them. Some organizations spent more money to cool their servers than on leasing or purchasing them, as the heat generated from functioning servers had the capability of causing a failure of the said servers. Consequently, companies were compelled to pay not only for powering their servers, but for cooling them down as well. All the power consumption increased corporate costs and resulted in a negative impact on the environment.

Green computing also involved reduced resource consumption and proper disposal of electronic waste (E-waste). E-waste affected nearly every system in the human body because the materials that it was made up of contained an excess of toxic components, including mercury, lead, cadmium, polybrominated flame retardants, barium, and lithium. Even the plastic casings of electronic products contained polyvinyl chloride. The health effects of these toxins on humans included birth defects and damage to various organs including the brain, heart, liver, kidney, and the skeletal system. They also had a significant negative effect on the human body's nervous and reproductive systems.²⁸

The IT industry did bring in several protocols to reduce the negative impact of electronic waste on the environment. In 1992, the US Environmental Protection Agency²⁹ launched Energy Star, a voluntary labeling program that was intended to endorse and identify the energy efficiency of monitors, climate control apparatus, and other technologies. That resulted in the extensive adoption of the sleep mode option³⁰ in consumer electronics. At the same time, the Swedish organization TCO Development³¹ launched the TCO Certification program to promote low magnetic and electrical emissions from Cathode-Ray Tube³²(CRT)-based computer displays. The program was later expanded to include certification criteria on energy consumption, ergonomics,³³ and the use of hazardous materials in construction.

Analysts opined that emerging IT technologies, existing practices, and algorithms needed to be redefined for energy-efficient and sustainable operations. Moreover, they felt that IT technologies had a responsibility to limit the energy consumption and carbon footprint of other industries and organizations, while facilitating green environmental practices in their daily operations. With the rise in energy consumption, global warming, and e-waste, the idea of green computing was being seriously contemplated by both the government agencies and private companies, as part of good practices for sustainable development.

Need for Green Computin g in Cloud Services
There was no doubt that AWS-enabled its customers to become green and reduce their carbon footprint. According to AWS, a typical large-scale cloud provider achieved approximately 65% server utilization rates versus 15% server utilization rates for the on-premises servers of companies. This meant that when companies moved to the cloud, they typically functioned with less than one-fourth of the servers they operated with on their company premises.

Customers only needed 16% of the power with which they were operating their onpremises infrastructure when they shifted to the cloud. That represented an 84% reduction in the amount of power they consumed. In addition, a typical on-premises data center was 29% less efficient in the use of power than a typical large-scale cloud provider that used '-class facility designs, cooling systems, and workload-optimized equipment.³⁴

The enormous development in energy efficiency on the cloud was resulting in a huge drop in the negative impact on the climate, because less energy consumed meant fewer carbon emissions. This particular scenario persuaded large scale companies to go in for cloud services, instead of maintaining their own data centers. AWS claimed that on an average, AWS customers using the AWS Cloud used 77% fewer servers and 84% less power and utilized a 28% cleaner power mix, achieving a total reduction in carbon emissions of 88% than when operating their own data centers.³⁵ However, it was cloud service providers like AWS who needed to become greener. Cloud services involved a physical network of many computer servers installed in data centers all over the '. The servers in these data centers needed enormous amounts of energy to operate.

Usually, the energy was generated by non-renewable (coal, natural gas, nuclear) or renewable (wind or solar) energy sources. According to the experts, globally, temperatures, droughts, storms, and floods were increasing, largely due to the usage of dirty energy (energy generated by burning fossil fuels like coal and natural gas). While climate change could have anecdotal implications depending on the region, experts felt that the continued use of dirty energy by cloud data centers was exacerbating environmental problems.

Data centers such as those used by AWS to power its computing infrastructure and host cloud services operated 24/7 to facilitate online browsing, streaming, and communication, and required a remarkable amount of electricity to keep them running smoothly and securely. The rising demand for internet-based platforms and services had resulted in an enormous expansion in both the size and number of data centers, making them one of the largest consumers of electricity globally.

According to the Department of Energy,³⁶ data centers accounted for about 2% of all electricity use in the US.³⁷ Furthermore, 4.5% of global electricity consumption in 2025 was expected to be attributed to data centers. This underlined the need to look at ways to curtail their consumption. According to the Environmental Protection Agency,³⁸ by 2020, the carbon emissions from data centers in the US would have quadrupled to 680 million tons per year, accounting for more than the aviation industry.³⁹

Furthermore, while the internet had global reach, analysts opined that the quick expansion in data centers had not been evenly distributed. Data centers were highly concentrated, causing a considerable increase in local electricity demand in certain places across the '. According to experts, 70% of the ''s internet traffic passed through data centers installed in a single county in Northern Virginia in the US, which was called "data center alley". The largest data center hub in the ',⁴⁰ this was home to more than 100 data centers and had more than 10 million square feet of data center space. However, analysts observed that dirty energy still powered most of the internet traffic at that hub.

Green cloud architecture was one of the latest developments of the green computing concept. The aim of this unified solution was to provide both customers and cloud providers with high-level architecture that supported energy-efficient service allocation using cloud technology (see Exhibit V). The goal was to satisfy the demand for highlevel computing services on the cloud customers' side and save energy on the cloud service providers' side through the green cloud infrastructure.

Amazon 's Bid to Become Green
Observing the urgent need for green computing, top global IT companies like Google LLC, Facebook Inc., Apple Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Intel Corporation, Dell Inc., Salesforce.com, Inc., and Cisco Systems Inc., etc. had adopted several green computing processes (see Exhibit VI). Many of them took steps to secure renewable sources of

power, which was expected to keep investors happy as it demonstrated the companies' commitment to reducing carbon emissions and tackling climate change.

In the year 2018, Amazon was accountable for 44.4 megatons of carbon emissions, which was as much as Finland had emitted that year.⁴¹ Most of those were third-party carbon emissions that included packaging and transportation of Amazon goods and emissions from business travel. Amazon itself set out a policy to reach net zero 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement's⁴² 2050 schedule, a goal enshrined in its Climate Pledge policy launched in 2019. Hurst said, "In addition to the environmental benefits inherently associated with running applications in the cloud, investing in renewable energy is a critical step toward addressing our carbon footprint globally."⁴³ As part of that pledge, AWS undertook different green computing processes at its data centers.

In 2014, Bezos announced a long-term commitment to powering all of Amazon's data centers with 100% renewable energy. According to AWS, it was investing in green energy initiatives and was motivated to commit to an ambitious goal of 100% use of renewable energy by 2040. It was doing this with the support of smart environmental policies and was leveraging the expertise in technology that led to sustainable improvement. In this endeavor, AWS's initiatives included enabling renewable energy projects, ongoing innovation in its facilities, and increasing usage of equipment to boost energy efficiency.

Furthermore, Amazon associated with different environmental groups in the US. It advocated at the federal and state levels for policies aimed at creating a favorable renewable energy environment that incentivized investment in utility-scale solar energy projects. Peter DeSantis, Vice-President, Infrastructure, AWS, said, "We continue to ramp our sustainability efforts in areas where availability of renewable energy sources is low or proposed projects are stalled, and where the energy contribution goes onto the same electric grid that powers AWS data centers."⁴⁴

In April 2016, Amazon joined Apple, Google, and Microsoft in filing an Amicus Brief⁴⁵ that supported the continued implementation of the US Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power Plan (CPP)⁴⁶ and discussed the IT industry's rising aspiration for affordable renewable energy across the US.

AWS' Green Computing Practices
An industry expert, Jonathan Koomey, mentioned three metrics to assess the relative greenness of different clouds, namely, the efficiency of a data center's infrastructure (lights, cooling, and so on), the efficiency of its servers, and the source of its electricity. AWS mentioned that carbon emissions at a data center were a factor of three things: the number of servers running, the total energy required to power each server, and the carbon intensity of the energy source used to power those servers.

To further reduce its carbon footprint, AWS banked heavily on a tool known as Renewable Energy Credit (REC), which was basically a token representing a utility's green energy generation. Industry experts observed that only a small portion of each cloud company's energy came directly from solar or wind installations; the rest came from RECs.

Power Purchase Ag reements
A critical measure of a data center's greenness was the source of its energy. AWS provided a map illustrating which of its data centers ran on green energy and which did not (see Exhibit VII). AWS entered into Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs)⁴⁷ with power companies to procure green energy to power its data centers.

In 2014, AWS teamed up with Pattern Development⁴⁸ to build and operate the 150 MW Amazon Wind Farm Fowler Ridge in Indiana. As of January 1, 2016, Amazon

Wind Farm Fowler Ridge was live and was producing electricity. In June 2016, AWS and Dominion Energy, Inc. (Dominion)⁴⁹ associated on a renewable energy delivery agreement. As per the agreement, Dominion would manage and assimilate the energy produced from various Amazon wind and solar farm projects on the grid that served AWS data centers.

AWS had a solar project, Amazon Solar Farm US East, an 80 MW facility in Accomack County, Virginia, which began production in October 2016. In November 2016, AWS announced five new solar farms across the Commonwealth of Virginia. Amazon worked with developers Virginia Solar LLC⁵⁰ and Community Energy Solar, LLC⁵¹ on the projects. It further collaborated with an affiliate of Dominion to own and operate the solar farms in the long term.

By December 2016, the five solar farms of AWS star ted operating in t he Commonwealth of Virginia. Denver Riggleman, Virginia Congressman, said, "I applau d Amazon for their investmen t in renewable energy projects in the Commonwealth of Virginia. This solar energy project will generate 65 megawatts of renewable energy, which will create clean jobs for the region."⁵² Together with Amazon Solar Farm US East, th e six solar far ms brought 260 MW of renewable energ y capacity on the grid.

In 2018, AWS said it had made a lot of progress in its sustainability commitment, and exceeded 50% of renewable energy use.⁵³ By the end of 2019, AWS had nine renewable energy farms in the US, including six solar farms located in Virginia and three wind farms in North Carolina. AWS was planning to add three more renewable energy projects, one more in the US, one in Ireland, and one in Sweden. Once completed, they were expected to produce approximately 2.7 GW of renewable energy an nu ally. These solar f acili ties were expected t o sup ply energ y t o Ama zon's fulfillment network in Europe, as well as the AWS data centers.

Energy-Saving Systems at the Data Centers
AWS put special focus on environmental considerations at its data centers, right from site selection and construction to operations and sustainability. It took utmost care to choose its data center keeping in mind environmental risks such as flooding, extreme weather conditions, and seismic activity. AWS proactively prepared for possible environmental threats like natural disasters and fire.

For this, it installed automatic sensors and responsive equipment to safeguard the data centers. For instance, water-detecting devices would alert employees to catch water-related disasters and automatic pumps would remove liquid and prevented damage. Likewise, automatic fire detection and control equipment reduced risk and notified AWS employees and firefighters about any incident of fire.

To reduce inefficiencies in the hardware and software running in the data centers, AWS ran virtual machines on the servers to limit downtime; it was also committed to automation software. Software automation-enabled IT experts to maximize the traditional utilization and consolidation ratios at the data centers. The higher the ratios, the less the physical infrastructures needed.

Efficient Water Management
AWS focused on efficiency and innovation in its data centers to develop operational quality and reduce the negative impact on the environment. It implemented different initiatives to improve water use efficiency and reduced the use of drinking water for cooling the data centers. AWS developed a water utilization strategy by analyzing climate patterns for each AWS region, local water availability, and the prospect of conserving drinking water sources. AWS incorporated direct evaporative technology⁵⁴ for cooling its data centers, thereby considerably reducing energy and water consumption.

For instance, outside air was directly supplied to the data center without any water being used during the cooler months of the year. During the hottest months of the year, outside air was cooled through an evaporative process using water, before the air was allowed into the server rooms. The cooling systems were optimized to use minimal water and they utilized real-time sensor data to adapt to the changing weather conditions.

AWS strove to use non drinking water to cool the servers to save on drinking water. In Northern Virginia, AWS was the first cloud data center operator to be approved to use recycled water with direct evaporative cooling technology. It sought to implement onsite modular water treatment systems⁵⁵ in multiple regions. That was needed as the continuous cycling of water through evaporative cooling units led to the build up of minerals as the water evaporated, which eventually reached a level of concentration that required replacement with fresh water. Onsite water treatment allowed AWS to remove minerals and reuse the water for more process cycles.

Criticism of AWS's Green Computing Efforts
Despite its best efforts, Amazon was subjected to criticism from various quarters. In October 2017, a report by Greenpeace evaluated different IT companies on the basis of ren ewable-energy sources; tran sparency; renewa ble-energy commitment and policies; energy efficiency and greenhouse-gas mitigation, and renewable-energy procurement. The group gave public cloud leader AWS an overall 'C' grade, putting

it behind infrastructure rivals Google (which earned an 'A') and Microsoft ('B')⁵⁶ (see Exhibit VIII).

The report also said, "One of the single biggest obstacles to sector transparency is Amazon Web Services (AWS). The ''s biggest cloud computer company remains almost completely non -transparent about the energy foo tprint o f its massive operations. Among the global cloud providers, only AWS still refuses to make public basic details on the energy performance and environmental impact associated with its operations."⁵⁷

In February 2019, another report by Greenpeace accused Amazon of abandoning its commitment to 100% renewable energy. As the report noted, some of its largest data centers were powered by only 12% renewable energy.

In Virginia, which supported the core of Amazon's cloud infrastructure, the report stated that AWS had increased its operations by 59% in the previous two years without adding any new renewable energy.⁵⁸ Elizabeth Jardim, Greenpeace USA Senior Corporate Campaigner, said, "Despite Amazon's public commitment to renewable energy, the ''s largest cloud computing company is hoping no one will notice that it's still powering its corner of the internet with dirty energy. Unless Amazon and other cloud giants in Virginia change course, our growing use of the internet could lead to more pipelines, more pollution and more problems for our climate."⁵⁹

Of the data center operators included in the Greenpeace analysis, Facebook had achieved 37% renewable energy in Virginia, Microsoft 34%, while Google and Digital Realty Trust Inc.⁶⁰ were operating with 4% renewable energy. Apple and Salesforce did not own data centers in Virginia, but had offset 100% and 44% of their co-location leases⁶¹ with renewables, respectively.⁶² Greenpeace explained that although AWS had purchased a sizeable amount of renewable energy locally in 2015-2016, this was dwarfed by the additional energy supply needed for new projects in the area.

In response to the report, an AWS spokesperson said, "Greenpeace has chosen to report inaccurate data about the energy consumption and renewable mix of AWS's infrastructure and did not perform proper due-diligence by fact checking with AWS before publishing. Greenpeace's estimates overstate both AWS's current and projected energy usage. Additionally, the report does not properly highlight that AWS has been a major investor in solar projects across the Commonwealth of Virginia and played a leading role in making it easier for us and other companies to bring more renewable energy to Virginia through our Market-Based Rate with Dominion Virginia Power."⁶³

However, a number of major internet companies had begun taking action to improve green computing measures in their cloud systems (see Exhibit IX). Greenpeace pointed to Apple as an industry leader, as the company had committed to powering its iCloud⁶⁴ exclusively through renewable energy. It had backed that up by constructing the US's largest privately-owned solar farms at its North Carolina data centers and by powering its new Nevada data centers with geothermal⁶⁵ and solar energy. Apple had also purchased wind energy for its Oregon and California data centers.

The Road Ahead
Amazon launched a website called https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/ to track progress and report on its sustainability commitments, initiatives, and performance. The site included information on Amazon's carbon footprint and other sustainability metrics that shared the progress of the company. The website claimed, "Our results show that AWS's infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy-efficient than the median of the surveyed US enterprise data centers. More than two-thirds of this advantage is

attributable to the combination of a more energy- efficient server population and much higher server utilization. When we factor in the carbon intensity of consumed electricity and renewable energy purchases, which reduce associated carbon emissions, AWS performs the same task with an 88% lower carbon footprint."⁶⁶

In April 2019, more than 4,500 Amazon employees through an open letter urged the company to take aggressive action on climate change and reduce its carbon footprint. The employees requested the management to stop offering custom cloudcomputing services that supported the oil and gas industry in extracting more fossil fuels. They also said Amazon had failed to disclose a companywide plan to reach zero carbon emissions within the timeline required by science, and that its 100% renewable energy goal had no deadline.⁶⁷

An Amazon spokesperson did not comment on the employees' letter but told business news channel CNBC that the company was taking several steps to address climate change. In a blog post, Dave Clark, Senior Vice-President of 'wide Operations, Amazon, added, "Earlier this year, we announced that we will share our companywide carbon footprint, along with related goals and programs. We also announced Shipment Zero, our vision to make all Amazon shipments net zero carbon, with 50% of all shipments net zero by 2030."⁶⁸ However, analysts pointed out that Amazon had not actually disclosed how it planned to achieve net zero status or report the exact amount of its carbon emissions beyond its blog post.

On February 17, 2020, Bezos announced that he was committing $10 bn to address the climate crisis in a new initiative called the Bezos Earth Fund. The effort was supposed to fund scientists, activists, and nongovernmental organizations. Bezos, who had been pushed by Amazon employees on climate issues, said he expected to start issuing grants in 2020 summer. He said, "Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet. I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share."⁶⁹

The workers at Amazon, through their group "Amazon Employees for Climate Justice", stated that although they commended Bezos's philanthropy, they felt that one hand cannot give what the other is taking away. They added, "The people of Earth need to know: When is Amazon going to stop helping oil and gas companies ravage Earth with still more oil and gas wells? When is Amazon going to stop funding climate-denying think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and climatedelaying policy?"⁷⁰

Suggested Readin gs an d References

1. "Amazon Continues Renewable Energy Investments with Wind and Solar Projects in Australia, Europe, and the US," www.energytrend.com, March 15, 2020.
2. "Amazon to Invest in Four New Renewable Energy Projects," www.powertechnology. com, March 13, 2020.
3. Andrew Fanthrop, "Four New Renewable Energy Projects Planned for Amazon's Net-Zero Push," www.nsenergybusiness.com, March 13, 2020.
4. "Amazon Continues Renewable Energy Investments with Wind and Solar Projects in Australia, Europe, and the US," www.press.aboutamazon.com, March 12, 2020.
5. Karen Weise, "Jeff Bezos Commits $10 bn to Address Climate Change," www. nytimes.com, February 17, 2020.
6. Alex Perikallin, "Going Green in IT: How and Why," www.kaspersky.com, January 17, 2020.
7. Ben Saunders, "Who's Using Amazon Web Services? [2020 Update]," www.contino.io, January 8, 2020.
8. "What is AWS? Amazon Cloud Services Tutorial," www.guru99.com, 2020.
9. "Amazon, Google, Microsoft: Here's Who has the Greenest Cloud," www.wired.com, December 18, 2019.
10. "Ser verless is Green: Healthy as Green Tea, Easy as Cornflakes!" www.slappforge.com, November 14, 2019.
11. Cristina Vargas, "Cloud Market in 2019 and Predictions for 2022," www.skyhigh networks.com, October 25, 2019.
12. Daniel Oberhaus, "Amazon, Google, Microsoft: Here's Who has the Greenest Cloud," www. wired.com, October 12, 2019.
13. Jay Chapel, "SaaS vs. PaaS vs. IaaS - Where the Market is Going," www.business2 community.com, May 28, 2019.
14. Emma Newburger, "More Than 4,500 Amazon Employees Push for Aggressive Action on Climate Change," April 11, 2019.
15. www.gartner.com, April 2, 2019.
16. Cassady Craighill, "Greenpeace Finds Amazon Breaking Commitment to Power Cloud with 100% Renewable Energy," www.greenpeace.org, February 13, 2019.
17. Will Calvert, "Amazon is Breaking Its Renewable Energy Commitments, Greenpeace Claims," www.datacenterdynamics.com, February 14, 2019.
18. "Clicking Clean Virginia," www.greenpeace.org, February 13, 2019.
19. Amazon 10K Report 2019.
20. Gladys Rama, "AWS Ear ns 'C' Grade in Green Computing Report," www.awsinsider.net, November 1, 2017.
21. "70% of the ''s Internet Traffic Passes Through Virginia's Data Center Alley," www.eyerys.com, December 3, 2016.
22. "The Sun Shines on Amazon's Cloud in Virginia," www.businesswire.com, November 17, 2016.
23. Jeff Barr, "Cloud Computing, Server Utilization, and the Environment," www.aws.amazon. com, June 5, 2015.
24. Kenneth C Laudon and Jane P Laudon, Management Information Systems, Pearson, 2013.
25. "Harmful Effects Caused by Improper Computer & Electronic Waste Recycling," www.greencitizen.com
26. "It's Greener in the Cloud," www.aws.amazon.com

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1. A carbon footprint is historically defined as the total greenhouse gas emissions caused by an individual, event, organization, or product, expressed in terms of the carbon dioxide equivalent.
2. "Amazon Continues Renewable Energy Investments with Wind and Solar Projects in Australia, Europe, and the US," www.press.aboutamazon.com, March 12, 2020.
3. Amazon.com, Inc., is a US-based multinational conglomerate technology company based in Seattle. It focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence and was founded in 1994.
4. Net zero refers to achieving an overall balance between emissions produced and emissions taken out of the atmosphere.
5. "Amazon Continues Renewable Energy Investments with Wind and Solar Projects in Australia, Europe, and the US," www.press.aboutamazon.com, March 12, 2020.
6. One MW is equal to one million watts or one thousand kilowatts.
7. A megawatt hour (Mwh) is equal to 1,000 Kilowatt hours (Kwh). It is equal to 1,000 kilowatts of electricity used continuously for one hour.
8. "Amazon Continues Renewable Energy Investments with Wind and Solar Projects in Australia, Europe, and the US," www.energytrend.com, March 15, 2020.
9. "Amazon to Invest in Four New Renewable Energy Projects," www.power-technology.com, March 13, 2020.
10. The International Energy Agency is a Paris-based autonomous intergovernmental organization established in the framework of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 1974 in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis. It works with countries around the ' to shape energy policies for a secure and sustainable future. Its main areas of focus are energy security, economic development, environmental awareness, and engagement 'wide.
11. Andrew Fanthrop, "Four New Renewable Energy Projects Planned for Amazon's Net-Zero Push," www.nsenergybusiness.com, March 13, 2020.
12. Greenpeace is a non-governmental environmental organization with offices in over 55 countries and an international coordinating body in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It was founded in 1971. Greenpeace organizes campaigns to influence international treaties and conventions on environmental protection.
13. Amazon Simple Queue Service is a distributed message queuing service which supports programmatic sending of messages via web service applications as a way to communicate over the Internet.
14. Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web Services that provides object storage through a web service interface.
15. Ben Saunders, "Who's Using Amazon Web Services? [2020 Update]," www.contino.io, January 8, 2020.
16. Artificial intelligence is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans.
17. Infrastructure as a service refers to online services that provide high-level Application Programming Interface (API) used to dereference various low-level details of underlying network infrastructure like physical computing resources, location, data partitioning, scaling, security, backup, etc.
18. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a type of cloud computing offering in which the service provider delivers a platform to clients, enabling them to develop, run, and manage business applications without the need to build and maintain the infrastructure that software development processes typically require.
19. Jay Chapel, "SaaS vs. PaaS vs. IaaS - Where the Market is Going," www.business2community.com, May 28, 2019.
20. Statistica is an advanced analytics software package originally developed by StatSoft, which was acquired by Dell in March 2014.
21. Amazon 10K Report 2019.
22. oogle Cloud Platform, offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search and YouTube. It was launched in 2008.
23. Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers. It was released in 2010.
24. CSA is the ''s leading organization dedicated to defining and raising awareness of best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment. It was founded in 2008.
25. Cristina Vargas, "Cloud Market in 2019 and Predictions for 2022," www.skyhighnetworks.com, October 25, 2019.
26. Kenneth C Laudon and Jane P Laudon (2013), Management Information Systems, Pearson.
27. A greenhouse gas is a gas that absorbs and emits radiant energy within the thermal infrared range. Greenhouse gases cause the greenhouse effect on planets. The primary greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone.
28. "Harmful Effects Caused by Improper Computer & Electronic Waste recycling," www.greencitizen.com
29. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is an independent agency, specifically an independent executive agency, of the US federal government for environmental protection.
30. In sleep mode, the PC enters a low-power state. The PC's state is kept in memory, but other parts of the PC are shut down and won't use any power.
31. TCO Development is owned by TCO, the Swedish Confederation of Professional Employees, a non-profit and politically independent organization. TCO works internationally with economic issues, employment, working conditions, and trade union and human rights. It was established in 1994.
32. The Cathode-Ray Tube (CRT) is a vacuum tube that contains one or more electron guns and a phosphorescent screen and is used to display images.
33. Ergonomics is the application of psychological and physiological principles to the engineering and design of products, processes, and systems.
34. "It's Greener in the Cloud," www.aws.amazon.com
35. Jeff Barr, "Cloud Computing, Server Utilization, and the Environment," www.aws.amazon.com, June 5, 2015.
36. The US Department of Energy is a cabinet-level department of the US Government concerned with the US' policies regarding energy and safety in handling nuclear material. It was founded in 1977.
37. Daniel Oberhaus, "Amazon, Google, Microsoft: Here's Who has the Greenest Cloud," www.wired.com, October 12, 2019.
38. The Environmental Protection Agency is an independent agency, specifically an independent executive agency, of the US federal government for environmental protection. It was founded in 1977.
39. "Serverless is Green: Healthy as Green Tea, Easy as Cornflakes!" www.slappforge.com, November 14, 2019.
40. "70% of the ''s Internet Traffic Passes Through Virginia's Data Center Alley," www.eyerys.com, December 3, 2016.
41. Alex Perikallin, "Going Green in IT: How and Why," www.kaspersky.com, January 17, 2020.
42. The Paris Agreement is an agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, dealing with greenhouse-gas-emissions mitigation, adaptation, and finance, signed in 2016.
43. Andrew Fanthrop, "Four New Renewable Energy Projects Planned for Amazon's Net-Zero Push," www.nsenergybusiness.com, March 13, 2020.
44. "The Sun Shines on Amazon's Cloud in Virginia," www.businesswire.com, November 17, 2016.
45. Amicus briefs are legal documents filed in appellate court cases by non-litigants with a strong interest in the subject matter. The briefs advise the court of relevant, additional information or arguments that the court might wish to consider.
46. The Clean Power Plan was an administration policy aimed at combating anthropogenic climate change (global warming) that was first proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in June 2014.
47. A power purchase agreement, or electricity power agreement, is a contract between two parties, one which generates electricity and one which is looking to purchase electricity.
48. Pattern Development is a leading US-based renewable energy developer with a pipeline of 10,000 MW of projects around the ' as of 2020.
49. Dominion Energy, Inc., commonly referred to as Dominion, is an American power and energy company headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, that supplies electricity in parts of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. It was founded in 1983.
50. Virginia Solar LLC is a Richmond-based developer of clean, safe, and environmentally sensitive utility-scale solar projects in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
51. Community Energy Solar LLC offers solar energy to businesses and the general public. The company is based in Pennsylvania and was founded in 1999.
52. "Amazon Continues Renewable Energy Investments with Wind and Solar Projects in Australia, Europe, and the US," www.press.aboutamazon.com, March 12, 2020.
53. "Amazon, Google, Microsoft: Here's Who has the Greenest Cloud," www.wired.com, December 18, 2019.
54. Direct evaporative cooling (open circuit) is used to lower the temperature and increase the humidity of air by using latent heat of evaporation, changing liquid water to water vapor. In this process, the energy in the air does not change.
55. Modular water treatment systems are imperative for ensuring that the quality and safety of water used for drinking, irrigation, recreation, and industrial uses is never compromised. These treatment systems will remove contaminants so that it can be used for a variety of purposes.
56. Gladys Rama, "AWS Earns 'C' Grade in Green Computing Report," www.awsinsider.net, November 1, 2017.
57. I b i d .
58. Daniel Oberhaus, "Amazon, Google, Microsoft: Here's Who has the Greenest Cloud," www.wired.com, October 12, 2019.
59. Cassady Craighill, "Greenpeace Finds Amazon Breaking Commitment to Power Cloud with 100% Renewable Energy," www.greenpeace.org, February 13, 2019.
60. Digital Realty Trust, Inc. is a real estate investment trust that invests in carrier-neutral data centers and provides co-location and peering services. It was founded in 2004.
61. A co-location center is a type of data center where equipment, space, and bandwidth are available for renting to retail customers.
62. Cassady Craighill, "Greenpeace Finds Amazon Breaking Commitment to Power Cloud with 100% Renewable Energy," www.greenpeace.org, February 13, 2019.
63. Will Calvert, "Amazon Is Breaking Its Renewable Energy Commitments, Greenpeace Claims," www.datacenterdynamics.com, February 14, 2019.
64. iCloud is a cloud storage and cloud computing service from Apple Inc. launched on October 12, 2011.
65. Geothermal energy is a renewable energy source because heat is continuously produced inside the earth. People use geothermal heat for bathing, to heat buildings, and to generate electricity.
66. "Sustainability in the Cloud," www. sustainability.aboutamazon.com
67. Emma Newburger, "More Than 4,500 Amazon Employees Push for Aggressive Action on Climate Change," April 11, 2019.
68. I b i d .
69. Karen Weise, "Jeff Bezos Commits $10 bn to Address Climate Change," www.nytimes.com, February 17, 2020.
70. I b i d .