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Amazon Pursues More Renewable Energy, Following Google, Apple, And Facebook (fortune.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes:
Amazon will open a 100-turbine, 253-megawatt wind farm in Texas by the end of next year -- generating enough energy to power almost 90,000 U.S. homes. Amazon already has wind farms in Indiana, North Carolina, and Ohio (plus a solar farm in Virginia), and 40% of the power for AWS already comes from renewable sources, but Amazon's long-term plan is to raise that to 100%.
But several of the world's largest tech companies are already pursuing their own aggressive renewable energy programs, according to Fortune. Google "has said it's the largest non-utility purchaser of renewable energy in the world. Apple claims that in 2015, 93% of its energy came from renewable sources, and its data centers are already 100% run on renewables (though that claim does rely on carbon trading). Facebook, which also uses Texas wind facilities, is aiming for 50% of its data center power to come from renewables by 2018. Even slightly smaller companies like Salesforce have made big commitments to renewable energy."
Last year for the first time utilities actually bought less than half the power produced by wind farms -- because tech companies, universities, and cities had already locked it down with long-term contracts.
But several of the world's largest tech companies are already pursuing their own aggressive renewable energy programs, according to Fortune. Google "has said it's the largest non-utility purchaser of renewable energy in the world. Apple claims that in 2015, 93% of its energy came from renewable sources, and its data centers are already 100% run on renewables (though that claim does rely on carbon trading). Facebook, which also uses Texas wind facilities, is aiming for 50% of its data center power to come from renewables by 2018. Even slightly smaller companies like Salesforce have made big commitments to renewable energy."
Last year for the first time utilities actually bought less than half the power produced by wind farms -- because tech companies, universities, and cities had already locked it down with long-term contracts.
They just want to kill a bunch of birds to reduce the chances of bird-strike drone-delivery failures.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Delivering by truck is such a dinosaur when you can deliver via wind-powered drones.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
What's happened is that Amazon has come to realize that there is little point in continually pay someone for power when you can just get your own. This is simply a cost cutting measure to grow their AWS profit margin and ensure they can compete with competitive pricing. It's also good PR which they can use as ammunition for marketing. Amazon execs don't give a fuck about the environment, it's all about the money.
Actually, I suspect they do. I know a lot of higly placed people that actually do care about it. If thy didn't, for the immense drain on profitability as claimed by some - they'd never be allowed to go this route.
What is changing, is that despite what a lot of CogDis people think, a threshhold is being crossed. CogDis people can bring out the same old memes of it won't work, it won't work economically, it won't work because the sun isn't shining or the wind doesn't blow 24/7 - but this stuff's gettin' real.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Last I checked, wind and solar guarantee exactly zero power coincident with demand.
Check again; solar is follows the morning demand curve pretty closely and can be better matched to demand in some markets by facing panels westward.
Some places have very reliable winds and pretty good forecasting, which has gotten much better in the past several years.
So your "zero power coincident" is a gross exaggeration.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Also, "demand" is not fixed. With variable pricing, consumers and companies can be incentivized to use power when it is cheap, and conserve when it is not. Many appliances, such as dishwashers, clothes washers, and dryers, have a delay feature. ACs and refrigerators can be pre-chill when power is cheap, and idle their compressors when prices spike.
My city (San Jose, California) has smart meters, and my AC will automatically shutdown if there is a power shortage. I get discounted power at other times for allowing the power company to install the cutoff switch.
My wife has a Tesla, and it is preprogrammed to start charging at 2:30am, when power is cheapest. As electric cars are more widely adopted, they can act like a sponge to soak up surplus power whenever it is available. There are also proposals to have idle electric cars feed power back to the grid during shortages.
Into a pump for underground compressed air for later use, into a pump to push water uphill for later use, into a resistive load, i.e. a heating element in a large body of water, into some large flywheels, or in the last resort, "feather the props".
Obviously, options 1-3 above add to cost, and option 4 is somewhat wasteful, but it's not a technical problem.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
So... are you guys for free markets or not.. it's so hard to tell because your position changes with the direction of the breeze.
That's not really dumping it. That's converting it to potential energy. The OP was implying that it gets dumped, as in wasted. Which I don't understand. Because if you don't use electricity, it doesn't really get generated in the first place.
So it makes sense for them to continue to generate and push the power into an overloaded grid that has no use for it, because they make money doing that.
And while wind companies are doing that, what are the coal/gas/oil plants doing? The rational move for them is to not generate once the price of electricity drops below the price of whichever fossil fuel they use, which means less CO2 is produced. It may not be an exact "every watt of wind power generated means one watt equivalent less CO2" but it's still reducing CO2 emissions.
Blah, no one ever got superpowers from a wind turbine accident!
And while wind companies are doing that, what are the coal/gas/oil plants doing?
Gas turbines shutdown.
Coal continues to generate, because the latency is too long to be worth shutting them down for a price dip only lasting an hour or two.
Nobody uses oil for grid connected power generation.