Amazon Battles Google for Renewable Energy Crown (bloomberg.com)

Readers share a report: Even in the age of coal enthusiast President Donald Trump, clean-energy developers are finding plenty of interest in wind and solar power from businesses with sustainability targets, especially technology companies. That was on display in a video tweeted Thursday by Amazon.com Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos, as he christened the 253-megawatt Amazon Wind Farm Texas in Scurry County. Amazon has bought more than 1.22 gigawatts of output to date from U.S. clean-energy projects, second only to Alphabet's Google, with 1.85 gigawatts. Corporations have agreed to buy 1.9 gigawatts of clean power in the U.S. this year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and are on pace to match the 2.6 gigawatts signed last year.

Comments

Re:The US "green energy" system is flawed.

[ranton]

What happens when Amazon or Google buy 1 GW of green power, does a coal plant gets shut down? No. What happen is that the typical home customer has its share of green power reduced from say, 4% to 3%. The production remains the same. What matters is the total emissions of the country, divided by its population. The US continue to be one of the worst.

Yes, coal plants do get shut down. US utilities have plans to close 40 coal power plants over the next four years. These plants are primarily shut down because of competition with natural gas and renewal energy. So when Amazon or Google buy 1 GW of green power, that is 1 GW less that coal power plants are making in revenue. That causes power plants to be shut down.

US residential electricity sales have been going down since 2010 in both total figures and per capita figures. This is both because of energy efficiency improvements and cheaper forms of energy production. US carbon emissions are going down because of these trends.