That Time Amazon Lied About Their Renewable Energy Use

Ned Bellavance: [00:00:00] I think it's so strange, going back to my RSS thing, how do you have a blog and not have an RSS feed? Like Almost every blog platform just natively supports that. You don't even have to ask. Just boom, it's there.

Chris Hayner: Maybe this blog is daring to be different.

Ned Bellavance: It is using a me. Isn't that like an Apple thing? I think so.

Okay, so maybe it's just that Apple sucks.

Hello, alleged human, and welcome to the Chaos Lover Podcast. My name is Ned, and I'm definitely not a robot. I'm a real human person who is not terrified of spiders. Why would you, why would you even bring that up? I don't, I don't mind walking through cobwebs and it definitely does not fill me with dread to see something with eight legs.

I have not refused to see the Black Widow movie simply because of the name. That would [00:01:00] be silly. With me is Chris, who's also here. Hi Chris.

Chris Hayner: I had a spider appear completely out of nowhere on the ceiling in the shower a few days ago.

Ned Bellavance: It's hard to think of a worse possible time for a spider to appear.

Chris Hayner: This is how you do it. If you really want to end somebody, you put a spider on the ceiling in the shower because nothing good can come from that scenario.

Ned Bellavance: I mean, I know you screamed. I'm just wondering what you did next.

Chris Hayner: Well, I definitely don't have one of those removable showerhead things. So I definitely didn't very carefully take that out of the holster and spray the everliving shit out of the ceiling, which may or may not be waterproof.

Ned Bellavance: Oh Chris, have you never heard the song The Itsy Bitsy Spider? It's gonna fucking come back. That's just the nature of things.

Chris Hayner: Well, I know that now.

Ned Bellavance: Oh, well, alright. We should probably get this episode done before it comes along and bites you and ends you.

Chris Hayner: Or stabs [00:02:00] me. It's 2024, they're all armed.

Ned Bellavance: Spiders, yes.

Somehow it's our fault, too.

Chris Hayner: So anyway, let's talk about The recent release of the Amazon story, where they said that they were 100 percent renewable, and that story might have been written by AI.

Ned Bellavance: When you say might

Chris Hayner: I say that because, according to everyone except Amazon, they're not even close to 100%. You get it?

Because Amazon's wrong and like AI is wrong a lot. Do you get it?

Ned Bellavance: Nope.

Chris Hayner: Do you get it? Fine.

Ned Bellavance: Fine,

Chris Hayner: don't be fun.

Ned Bellavance: I won't.

Chris Hayner: Last week, Amazon announced something pretty surprising. They claimed that they hit their goal of being 100 percent renewable, meaning that all of their places of operation are running on renewable energy.

They hit their goal of being 100 percent renewable this year, which is seven years earlier than their previously stated goal.

Ned Bellavance: And we're talking about Amazon, the whole company here, not just AWS.

Chris Hayner: Correct. [00:03:00] Okay. Obviously the data centers play a huge part in it, but it's the entire corporate entity that is Amazon.

Ned Bellavance: Okay.

Chris Hayner: So this is a strange thing to announce and a strange time to have announced it, because I don't know if you know this, but Amazon's renewable energy score is not exactly the top hit on Google News these days. Other shit is going on, I guess is my point.

Ned Bellavance: A couple things, yeah.

Chris Hayner: But announce it, they did.

And it likely would have come and gone with little fanfare, except for one tiny little problem. A group of people that actually work at Amazon called Bullshit. Oh. Like, real loud, too.

Ned Bellavance: Were they immediately and summarily fired?

Chris Hayner: No, they can't do it, and you'll see why in a minute.

Ned Bellavance: Interesting, okay.

Chris Hayner: The Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group started based on a shareholder resolution back in 2018, has a simple goal.

To bring together Amazonians, and [00:04:00] yes, that's what they call themselves. Yes. But bringing them together and encourage Amazon to do more on the issue of climate. Historically, Amazon has not been all that interested in climate. After all, this is America. How does a healthy planet make line go up? Exactly.

Ned Bellavance: It does not.

Chris Hayner: So, this group existing and trying to encourage policy is actually probably pretty important. Back in 2023, they threatened a walkout because of Amazon's, quote, lack of meaningful progress on its climate pledge. And things like climate pledges, companies trying to become sustainable, well, All of this absolutely matters going forward.

While data centers have historically been a smaller energy hog than many people think.

Ned Bellavance: I

Chris Hayner: mean, computer systems in general over our lifetimes have been doing nothing but getting smaller and getting less [00:05:00] greedy when it comes to power. This is still a huge growing segment of the market and the amount of power that they're going to take is going to change.

Recently we've seen specific cases like crypto, Where mining takes up so much of a local utilities output that the rest of the populace suffers, and it is likely that AI is driving data center growth that is going to do something very similar. But how significant would it be? Well, the International Energy Agency put out a report that estimates that by 2026, which if you're doing the math at home is five years from now, power consumption by data centers could double what it was in 2022.

Wow. Four years, double the amount of power. So if you want to see the actual numbers, that is 460 terawatt hours up to more than 1000 terawatt hours.

Ned Bellavance: [00:06:00] Okay.

Chris Hayner: I'm not an electrician, but I have been electrocuted before. So I feel qualified in saying that that is an insane amount of energy. We're going to have to find sustainable ways to generate it because no matter what Exxon says, eventually we're going to run out of oil.

But we will get to that.

Ned Bellavance: Before we get to the next thing, I want to ask, what's your, I was electrocuted story? Because I feel like everybody who's been electrocuted has at least one good story about it.

Chris Hayner: Oh, so, you know, back in the day when I actually did things. In the world, rehabbing houses and the like, I would replace outlets all the time.

I got to be kind of automatic about it to the point that for a long period of time there, I would replace an outlet without turning off the power.

Ned Bellavance: That's a choice.

Chris Hayner: I don't recommend that model just as like a fun fact for the, for the audience.

Ned Bellavance: Okay. I

Chris Hayner: wonder if I can still do it. I will be right back.

Ned Bellavance: I [00:07:00] also was electrocuted once and it was in a different set of circumstances.

I had trash picked a lamp because I was a teenager and that's how I got things. And unbeknownst to me, but knownst to possibly the previous owner, the hot wire on the Inside of the lamp had started touching the outside brass cup of the lamp. Cool. I went to go turn on said lamp and I was standing barefoot in the basement turning on the lamp and boy did the electricity find a way to go to ground.

Chris Hayner: So that was super fun. You recommend that everybody should try it.

Ned Bellavance: Uh, fortunately I was not gripping the lamp in any way. So it just like threw my arm backwards, but that could have potentially been much, much worse. Moving on.

Chris Hayner: Electricity is a powerful thing. Don't mess with it, especially on the outside of your house.

Ned Bellavance: Indeed.

Chris Hayner: Before we go any further, I want to make it [00:08:00] clear that this is not just intended to be a shit on Amazon show. Tempting, but no. Plenty of companies follow this exact same playbook. Amazon is high on commitments and pledges, not so high on results. It is particularly telling that they don't show up in any of the lists that highlight well performing sustainable companies, such as Dow Jones Sustainability Sustainability, you have words, use them.

Dow Jones Sustainability Index, Bloomberg's ESG disclosure scores, the Corporate Knight's Global 100, and so on. So let's just think about this as technology, but electricity, but in general, using the Amazon story as a metaphor. This is the latest thing, but everybody does it. So anyway, before we go further, let's talk about what does sustainability actually mean in the modern context?

Ned Bellavance: Okay.

Chris Hayner: So first off there have been [00:09:00] environmentalists complaining about waste, energy waste, any type of waste that you can think of. pollution, etc. since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In fact, I have no doubt that it goes way further back than that. I am sure that there was some Neanderthal who was upset about moving the sharp rocks out of the walking path because it upset the natural order of things.

Ned Bellavance: I'm certain of that, yes.

Chris Hayner: For our purposes, we're going to start with the real serious renewable energy movement that began with the concept of peak oil. Now there was also an oil crisis in the 70s that got everybody excited, but we're going to skip that too in the interest of time. The concept of peak oil is pretty simple.

Theory goes that there is a finite amount of oil in the world. Can't make more. Therefore, eventually, we're going to hit a point where it is harder to get more of it year after year. So if you think about this in terms of supply and [00:10:00] demand, it's not that much different than the sad tale of lobsters. Back in the 1700s, you could literally just go to the shore and pick up a lobster off the beach in Maine and take it home for dinner.

There are tons of stories in people's journals of them doing exactly that.

Ned Bellavance: Right, because lobster was considered a garbage food. It

Chris Hayner: was peasant food at the time because it was so easy to get. But as we took and took and took, as humans are wont to do, it became harder to get lobsters. And now they're 25 a pound, right?

So peak oil is exactly that, except the oil doesn't procreate.

Ned Bellavance: I mean, not on any kind of realistic timescale.

Chris Hayner: I guess that's true. We could start making oil now and start to reap the benefits in several million years. Yeah, like 65. I'm going to put in some, some long puts on that, I think.

Ned Bellavance: Okay, you do that.

Chris Hayner: This is not investment advice.

Ned Bellavance: Some futures trading.

Chris Hayner: When the [00:11:00] story came out about Peak Oil, or when the report came out, the date that was given was quote, between 1965 and 1970. This report was written in the late 50s. Irrespective of how the oil and gas industry responded to this threat, think fracking, coal mining, and writing shady deals with third world countries to ruin their countries in the name of economic profit, the seed was sown in the environmental movement to do something to get energy that didn't involve burning natural resources.

Now again, like I said, this is not a concept that just snapped into existence in the 1970s. There have been ways to get power that were renewable long before this. For example, the first hydroelectric power plant was built in the 1880s. Oh yeah, that was like 10 minutes after power was invented.

Ned Bellavance: Yeah.

Super cool. We went to Niagara a few weeks ago [00:12:00] and on the Canada side, like you do, 'cause that's the good side. And we did a tour of the now retired power plant that used to be hooked up. To Niagara Falls, and it was the construction for it started in the early 1900s, and it was one of the biggest hydroelectric projects of its time, and they had to invent all kinds of new technologies in order to harness the power of the falls and also generate the power consistently.

And this was before they had standards like the frequency at which power was generated. That had not been standardized yet. So a lot of standards and technologies were born over that time, but people don't realize how long hydroelectric power has been around. It's been a while.

Chris Hayner: And the thing about hydroelectric is it works super well.

It is highly reliable. You get all kinds of power out of it and the eventual return on investment is enormous. There is, however, that pesky problem of [00:13:00] needing a river. Yes. But not only needing a river, you need a river that is stable. Cause I don't know if people know this, but not all rivers stay in the same place.

Sometimes rivers move. To the hilarity and consternation of historians worldwide. You also need a river that is fast flowing enough to spin turbines to the level that makes it worth it. And also, remember the river! Hydroelectric dams are engineering marvels that are astonishingly expensive to build.

Making it rather tough to scale. And then finally, there are in fact, environmental and social considerations that come with literally rewriting the face of the earth with concrete. So let's just say there are pros and cons. Another type of energy source that is cool, or hot, and is older than you think, is geothermal.

So this is one that people have [00:14:00] probably, like, they've heard the words, but don't really know what it means or why or how it works. And I'm not going to go into it too deeply, but basically, you find a place in the earth that's super hot. Run a pipe through it. Run water through the pipe. Cold water gets hot.

Hot water turns into steam. Steam turns to turbine. Turbine makes electricity.

Ned Bellavance: Magic.

Chris Hayner: These things have the advantage of being consistent because they come from the inside of the freaking earth. And that thing is going to be pretty fiery for the next, I forgot, I meant to look this up but I'm winging it

Ned Bellavance: here,

Chris Hayner: 4 billion years?

Do we have 4 billion? Something like

Ned Bellavance: that. The only reason I know is because my children have asked me several times, like, is the sun going to explode? And I was like, well, it's going to become a red giant. And they're like, Oh no! And I'm like, it's 4 billion years.

Chris Hayner: No, no, no. Oh, you have the timeline wrong.

No, the Earth is going to explode, or no, the Earth is going to cool before the sun [00:15:00] explodes. By the time the sun explodes, the Earth is going to be dead.

Ned Bellavance: Still, it's not an immediate going concern.

Chris Hayner: And the other fun thing is we have been doing geothermal heating since. Basically prehistory. The oldest existing geothermal thing that we know of that still exists in the world is a heated pool, basically, in China that is dated to 300 BCE.

Alright. So yeah, this one goes back a little bit. Just a tad. Now, it's got a couple of other downsides to it. It is super consistent, but the amount of power you get out of it is not nearly as high as some of these other ones. And also, it's not everywhere on Earth that you can get the heat from geothermal.

You've got to find these pockets where the molten core of the Earth opens up. Because what we're not doing is drilling, you know, 500 miles into the core to get geothermal. That's just not practical. These things [00:16:00] have been around, but with the concept of an oil less world floating around in the ether, scientists started working more seriously on flexible alternatives.

And I bet you can guess what they came up with.

Ned Bellavance: Well, I can think of one. It's above me right now, and it's making everything intolerable.

Chris Hayner: Your children?

Ned Bellavance: Oh, yeah, that too.

Chris Hayner: I'm talking about solar power and wind power.

Ned Bellavance: Okay.

Chris Hayner: Solar panels have often been derided for being ugly and not working, which for a lot of their history was actually kind of fair.

It was an evolving technology. But modern panels are different. They are highly effective, they last a long time, they're getting smaller and more flexible, both literally and in terms of where you can install them. And the price to create them and the energy you get back from them is just insane.

Astonishing right now. According to the Carbon Disclosure [00:17:00] Project, the cost of electricity from utility scale solar arrays fell 85 percent between 2010 and 2020, making it cheaper than standard fossil fuel based power plants. Didn't see that shit coming, did you, Margaret? Indeed.

Ned Bellavance: No

Chris Hayner: solar on your house is still a good idea and it is a workable plan, but solar as a utility, particularly in places that get the right amount of sun, which if you know about.

The sun is basically everywhere is a great idea.

Ned Bellavance: Yeah, I mean, there are some caveats to that, depending on house is situated, how much sun it will actually gather. And of course, if you have trees around those become a detriment as opposed to a bonus. I know this because we tried to get solar panels for my house.

And. It would have produced more energy than we use for especially the summer months, but the cost of installing the [00:18:00] panels and the additional work would have required like a 30 year payback period. That will change as solar panels become more efficient and the price continues to drop. So I'm just going to reevaluate in like 4 or 5 years, and I bet at that point the break even will have dropped from 30 years to something like 15 or 10.

Chris Hayner: Yeah, I mean, honestly, as fast as this stuff is evolving, you might want to check this year and just see, I'm, I don't feel like I'm exaggerating about this. And the other thing is when it comes to house power. You're talking about re architecting a house that already existed. Hypothetically, if you were building new and you planned for solar, you would have had a very different outcome.

Ned Bellavance: Yes. If, if I wasn't retrofitting an existing house and I was building a new one with this in mind, I would have oriented the house a little bit different, designed, you know, the, the roofs a little bit different. And another really interesting thing is in addition to panels, there are now solar roof tiles.[00:19:00]

that look like regular roof tiles.

Chris Hayner: They are so cool. But

Ned Bellavance: they're actually, you know, solar, mini solar panels, essentially. They are not nearly as efficient as traditional solar panels, but they look a lot nicer.

Chris Hayner: They don't look like an obnoxious panel sticking up off your roof.

Ned Bellavance: Exactly. So long term that might actually end up being the better solution once the efficiency raises on those.

Chris Hayner: So there's a lot you can do with solar. The next one that came around and we already told, I'm not sure why I'm slow playing it, is wind power. Their progress in terms of output, if not 100 percent matching solar, at least kept pace in terms of improvements. It was 2015 when wind energy was considered competitive with fossil fuels based on power plants in many regions.

Now again, you've got to have the right kind of wind. So it's not every single place on earth. But where it works, it works super well. And I cannot believe I have to say this out loud. [00:20:00] Turbines don't kill birds, don't kill whales, and they don't change the tides. My God, people. How would that even happen?

Ned Bellavance: I mean, some birds are killed by turbines.

Chris Hayner: Some birds are idiots.

Ned Bellavance: But,

Chris Hayner: I have a window that killed a bird two weeks ago, should we ban windows?

Ned Bellavance: If you're concerned about birds, then you should ban cats, because holy shit, just little murder death machines is what they are.

Chris Hayner: Now, to be fair, there are actually a lot more energy sources out there that are renewable that have promise, but I'm going to stop with these two, because A, they're the most practical for large scale energy generation, and B, we don't have that much time.

Although, if you're interested in renewable energy and like awesome things, I highly encourage you to google Desert Salt Laser Energy Plant. I will say no more, I just want you to know that I want this idea to work out so bad because it is in fact awesome.[00:21:00]

You might be thinking, what in the hell does this have to do with anything that we started with? It seems like an easy enough thing. Amazon says they're using 100 percent renewables, so clearly. They're using 100 percent energy places from places like hydroelectric, solar, wind, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And that's just so very cute. Because this is America, and we've found ways to make this whole enterprise so much more complicated than that. Back in the late 90s, there was a push to get renewable energy off the ground. There were even tax breaks involved. In fact, they still exist. If you replace your windows or your large appliances, you might even still be able to apply for

Ned Bellavance: them.

Chris Hayner: On the large scale, though, there was a new program called Renewable Energy Certificates, or RECs. That acronym, as you'll see, is ironic. Created by the EPA, the idea here was simple. Every time a megawatt hour of energy is generated from a renewable source, [00:22:00] a REC is created. These can then be sold on the market and proudly be displayed by other companies as though they were using that energy themselves.

This is supposed to have two benefits. One, the income encourages the building of more renewable energy plants. Two, companies that have an incentive to buy them to advertise that they're at least making an honest effort to support renewables. This makes sense. After all, we have a huge amount of fossil fuel creating power plants.

That eventually will be replaced, but they exist right now. Any energy that's created by a renewable plant gets injected into the grid. And you just, there's no way to tell the difference between energy created by solar and by coal. Once it's in the grid, it's in the grid, right? There's no such thing as like organic volts or anything.

You can't check it for like, it's chi. Maybe you can't. Plus, like I said, it takes [00:23:00] time for these plants to get built. And what are you gonna do If you own a business that's like in the middle of the city? You can't exactly plant a wind farm on Broad Street. Although I asked AI to do it, and it is, uh, it, it, I kind of want us to do it.

Ned Bellavance: It looks pretty amazing. I would not be mad about this. ,

Chris Hayner: what's the problem? The problem, according to Amazon Climate Justice Group, is that Amazon is being willfully disingenuous about saying where the power comes from for their data centers and offices. How, they argue, does building a data center in Virginia, which is 100 percent powered by fossil fuels, buying RECs from California, where renewable energy is already aplenty, how does that benefit the environment, particularly in Virginia?

Ned Bellavance: Ew.

Chris Hayner: The answer is that it doesn't. Those credits don't encourage Virginia to do anything. In fact, there are real questions as to whether or not some of these RECs ever get used to generate any renewable energy at all. Because [00:24:00] it turns out, you don't need a plant to generate the energy to buy a REC.

There's a thing called an unbundled REC, which is like a credit to the future to be used later. This is like buying coupons to buy beer at a fair, and then trying to take them to a different fair, and they're like, we don't have that coupon. What are you talking about? Go back to your house, crazy sad man.

Ned Bellavance: This is getting very specific.

Chris Hayner: I don't know what you could possibly mean. So, Yeah, they're called unbundled RECs, and my question is why? Why is such a thing even part of this program? And the answer is, I don't know. I read a couple of explanations, none of them felt great.

Ned Bellavance: Lobbying from the fossil fuel companies?

Chris Hayner: It's possible, because this is what critics of the REC program call greenwashing. The act of making something look more environmentally friendly than it is. So, down to brass tacks. According to [00:25:00] the report, instead of the 100 percent renewables that Amazon claims that they use. Only around 22 percent of energy actually did come from renewable sources.

Now, if you're a math major, you'll realize that 22 is less than 100. A little bit. Oh, and there was this other claim that the group made that's going to be harder for Amazon to refute. Amazon deliveries are still largely done by diesel trucks crisscrossing the globe. How can you do that and still say 100 percent renewable?

Ned Bellavance: I mean, I understand the theory behind it was, how do we get money for these renewable energy? sources, and the idea was to build this credit. So even if you can't consume it, you can support it by buying the credits. There's a certain tipping point at which that doesn't really help anymore, and you just need to start using the stick.

I mean, like, if you use non renewable [00:26:00] energy sources, we're going to charge a tax, or something along those lines. to push people to using more renewable energy sources, and you have to fund renewable energy sources close to the places that want to consume it.

Chris Hayner: That last point is super important, because the further that energy has to be transferred, the less effective that plant is.

You lose electricity the longer the wire is.

Ned Bellavance: If

Chris Hayner: you don't believe me, go get a 100 foot extension cord and plug in something that pulls a lot of juice. And then watch your house burn down. Still, in terms of Amazon, there actually is hope. I'm going to look on the bright side and just say, perhaps this announcement was overenthusiastic, maybe premature, but maybe it also signals an internal change or increased seriousness.

A couple things came out this year that are worth [00:27:00] noting. Amazon announced, I think recently, I forget when because I didn't put it in the script because I'm a moron. Amazon announced at some point that they had put in an order for 100, 000 electric vans from Rivian to swap out last mile vehicles to something sustainable.

Now that is not the 18 wheelers that go across the country, but it's still a big deal. And back in May, they announced a new data center plan in Mississippi that included a deal with a local utility company for 650 megawatts of renewable energy to power the campus. Exactly what we just talked about.

According to the Amazon press release, this will quote, enable a total of 1. 3 gigawatts of new carbon free energy in Mississippi. So that's not nothing. And I think a lot of this actually does come down to what we talked about with the houses. It's retrofitting is a challenge. It [00:28:00] doesn't matter what building you're talking about.

Whether it's a house, it's a factory, it's a data center. If it's already built, it's basically already built. If you don't believe me, go try to put air conditioning into a house built in 1900.

Ned Bellavance: My parents had to do that.

Chris Hayner: How did it go?

Ned Bellavance: It was a project.

Chris Hayner: One thing that happens, especially in this environment, Amazon is going to continue to expand their services.

They're going to continue to build net new. Right. If they stick with this plan, like they did in Mississippi, where it seems like it worked out really well, there's hope.

Ned Bellavance: And the other interesting thing is. As new data centers are built, the existing power grid where they are often can't sustain the additional power draw, and so it's incumbent on the data center builders to basically add more power to the grid.

And if we incentivize them to choose renewable as an energy source, then that new data center. As a consequence, create more renewable energy, [00:29:00] and maybe some of that can be filtered back to the community at large, as opposed to just servicing that data center. Well, hey, thanks for listening or something. I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you made it all the way to the end, so congratulations to you, friend.

You accomplished something today. Now you can go sit on the couch. Fire up a hot dog using geothermal energy, and play a game, uh, that's not electronic. Save the Earth. You've earned it. You can find more about the show by visiting our LinkedIn page. Just search Chaos Lever, or go to the website, ChaosLever.

com. Leave a comment, leave a voicemail. We want to hear from you, and I bet some people are going to have opinions about this episode. Some of them might not even be terrible! Who knows? We'll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us. Hata for now.

People are gonna have opinions, Chris.

Chris Hayner: Opinions [00:30:00] about what?

Ned Bellavance: Spiders mostly, I bet. Electrified

Chris Hayner: spiders. Electric spiders.

Ned Bellavance: Boogie woogie

Chris Hayner: woogie.