Amazon has signed cross-portfolio power purchase agreement (PPA) deals with AES Corporation for California clean energy resources.
The logistics, delivery and web services behemoth said on 5 May that it has entered two PPAs with power company AES for renewable energy sourced from solar and battery energy storage system (BESS) assets in the CAISO service territory.
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Energy from a total of 450MW of solar PV and 225MW of four-hour duration BESS (1,200MWh) will be sold.
The announcement comes as Amazon targets powering its business from 100% renewable energy by 2030. The company just added another 3.5GW of renewable energy procurements in mid-April, including two large-scale solar-plus-storage projects, one in Arizona and another in California.
For AES, the PPAs are part of a major tranche of 5GW of such agreements that were brokered during 2021. AES said that it has already contracted with Fluence to deliver one of the battery projects included in the Amazon deals – AES is part-owner of the global energy storage system integration and clean energy services company.
AES president and CEO Andres Gluski said Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres will be among the facilities powered by the solar and batteries. AES has recently also been working with Google to provide renewable energy to the search engine company’s data centres, including from wind farms in Chile for Google’s first data centre in Latin America.
Fluence also supplied the BESS to Google’s pilot project at its Saint-Ghislain data centre in Belgium, which could serve as a replicable model for rollout elsewhere in the world.
Fluence and AWS in mutually beneficial collaboration
In a separate announcement also made last week, Fluence said that it will leverage AWS’ cloud computing capabilities to support both hardware and software platforms.
Fluence’s suite of services has broadly expanded in the past year or two to encompass a range of energy storage and renewable energy optimisation applications and the company said AWS’ technologies, particularly in machine learning could support the development and expansion of these.
Fluence noted that in addition to supplying BESS equipment to AES’ projects for Amazon, AES will also use the Fluence IQ Bidding application to optimise the batteries’ utilisation and dispatch.
Amazon’s web services arm could achieve 100% renewable energy by 2025, five years earlier than the rest of the group by utilising renewables and storage that are optimised through Fluence’s digital services, AWS energy and utilities general manager Howard Gefen said.
Elsewhere, AES’ Bulgarian subsidiary has just signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Bulgaria’s government to explore the construction of co-located solar-plus-storage and standalone BESS in the European country.