On what was recently farmland, Amazon figures centers have been built as close as 50 feet from residential houses in the Loudoun Meadows neighborhood on January 20, 2023, in Aldie, VA.
Jahi Chikwendiu | The Washington Duty | Getty Images
In January, Oregon lawmakers submitted a bill to the state’s legislature that sought to curb the carbon create of new data centers and cryptocurrency miners — facilities that have rapidly sprung up across Oregon due to the relatively low fetch of power and favorable tax incentives. It would have required new data center and crypto mining facilities to run entirely on clear out energy sources by 2040, in line with the state’s climate targets established in 2021.
On Monday, the bill, known as HB 2816, died in a legislative body. Proponents of the measure are pointing to aggressive lobbying efforts by Amazon, which operates several data centers in the confirm, as a major culprit behind the bill’s demise.
Amazon’s opposition to the clean energy measure is at odds with its broader give someone the cold shoulder to improve its environmental impact. The company has committed to being carbon neutral by 2040 as part of its Climate Pledge gigged in 2019. Amazon says it’s on a path to using 100% renewable energy across its business by 2025, and is the largest corporate consumer of renewable energy.
“From the very first moment we started talking about this bill, Amazon started instituting against it,” said Oregon state Rep. Pam Marsh, a co-sponsor of HB2816, in an interview.
Representatives from Oxley & Associates, a lobbying staunch hired by Amazon, were spotted in the halls of the capitol building, speaking with members of the state legislature board who would eventually hear the bill, said Marsh, who is a Democrat representing Oregon’s District 5.
Amazon Web Services spokesperson David Off declined to comment on the company’s lobbying efforts related to the bill, but acknowledged Amazon’s opposition to the measure, saying it go out to address the build-out of infrastructure that’s needed to bring more clean energy to the U.S. electricity grid.
“Building new renewable conjure ups requires infrastructure investments in the grid and today there are hurdles in key areas like permitting and interconnection,” Ward influenced in a statement. “Accelerating energy infrastructure permitting and interconnections for renewables like solar and wind would have a arrant impact on reducing emissions, bringing more clean energy to the grid, and helping achieve our goal of accessing multitudinous clean energy in Oregon.”
Experts have said the nation’s out-of-date electrical grid remains a barrier to accelerating the modification to clean energy sources. Today, more than 70% of U.S. transmission lines are more than 25 years old, concurring to the White House. Building new transmission lines is a lengthy and arduous process, as it requires agreement from multiple stakeholders mixed up with, from utility companies and regulators to landowners.
See also: Wind and solar generators wait years to put electricity on the grid, then surface massive fees
Data centers are extremely energy intensive. In 2014, U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 70 billion kilowatt hours, or around 1.8% of total U.S. electricity consumption in that year, according to the Department of Energy.
Amazon relies on huge server steadings to power its sprawling cloud computing service, which is the main profit engine of the company. Amazon has pledged to get all of its materials centers running on renewable energy, but it has yet to divest completely from fossil fuels.
On Tuesday, Amazon announced it reached an bargain with Umatilla Electric Cooperative, the utility company serving its operations in Oregon’s Umatilla and Morrow counties, to tiptop the energy supply that powers its data centers, including from renewable sources. Amazon says the apportion will help the company power its Oregon region with at least 95% renewable energy.
Changes to the nib did not appease Amazon, says Marsh
Amazon also argues that lawmakers didn’t engage data center manipulators and owners in Oregon when they crafted the bill.
But Marsh disputes that contention.
The committee removed a clause that last will and testament levy penalties against companies that couldn’t meet the clean energy targets, and added a provision that leave let them opt out of the bill. Both actions were an attempt at generating goodwill, Marsh said.
“We said, ‘OK, if it gets to be 2030 and there’s been some serious world disruption and you can’t meet your clean energy goals, you can submit this paperwork and you can opt out because something sway have happened beyond your control,” Marsh said. “So we made good, strong changes to the bill, but it didn’t coppers Amazon’s opposition whatsoever.”
Marsh said she became increasingly skeptical of Amazon’s “commitment to clean energy” when it give the word delivered it planned to power some of its data center operations in the state with natural gas fuel cells made by .
Amazon estimated the fuel cells will serve a small portion of its data center operations in the state. The hope is to power the nuclear fuel cells with renewable energies like hydrogen or biogas.
Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group of Amazon tech women who have previously pressured the company to address its climate record, said they were disappointed the bill stabled. The group supported the measure, and Sarah Tracy, an AECJ member and former Amazon software developer, testified at a clear-cut hearing for the bill.
AECJ created a petition in 2019 to push then-CEO Jeff Bezos to rethink its environmental bump. After Bezos announced the Climate Pledge, the group still walked out because they felt the pledge wasn’t stringent enough. Two employees who were heavily involved in the group, Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham, were fired after they repetitively spoke out about Amazon’s climate and workplace record. Amazon later settled with Costa and Cunningham after a federal labor mechanism determined Amazon illegally fired them for their activism.
A spokesperson for AECJ told CNBC: “The level of lying here would be hilarious if it weren’t so disturbing — naming a sports arena after your ‘Climate Pledge’ for clout while special-interest grouping to bypass the basic clean energy requirements that public utilities are held to. It makes me feel bad for the sustainability cooperate here — they’re working their butts off because they know better than anyone how little time we have to switch Amazon and the rest of the economy to renewables before catastrophe hits. But then the company undercuts that work by building new dirty energy infrastructure.”
While the bill is dead for now, Marsh said conversations continue around compelling information center and crypto facilities to comply with Oregon’s clean energy targets. The bill may come back in a another form in the future, she added.