On Thursday, integrated energy major bp announced that it has formalized a new series of clean power agreements that will more than triple the quantity of renewable power that it supplies to U.S.-based multinational Amazon for the operation of its digital data centers and infrastructure in Europe.
For its part, Amazon Web Services (AWS)—the “cloud major” that holds 45 percent of the total market for Internet-as-a-Service (IaaS)–will enable the acceleration of bp’s efforts to digitize its energy infrastructure and operations.
“Our successful relationship supports both bp’s and Amazon’s ambitions to reduce our emissions and help our customers reduce theirs,” said William Lin, bp’s executive VP in charge of regions, cities & solutions. “Amazon is helping bp with innovative digital technologies and, using our trading capabilities and scale, we will give Amazon the reliable and flexible renewable energy supplies they need to meet their ambition to decarbonize.”
“These new agreements with bp help us toward our goal of powering our operations with 100 percent renewable energy,” said Nat Sahlstrom, Director, Amazon Energy. “Our push for more renewable energy is one step toward our goal of reaching net-zero carbon by 2040 as part of Amazon’s commitment to The Climate Pledge.”
bp will supply Amazon with an additional 404MW of wind power in Europe starting in 2022. According to bp, 275 MW of this amount will be sourced from a new wind project in Sweden, and 129 MW from two new wind projects in projects.
These new supply contracts will add to amounts stipulated back in December 2019, when bp agreed to supply AWS with 170 MW of renewable energy in Europe.
The deal is part of bp’s growing sustainable power business, which includes tailored Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) within the corporate sector.
At the time that the initial PPA was announced, AWS announced separately that bp would be closing both of its European mega data centers—its largest globally—and migrating all data, along with 900 key applications, to AWS. One year later, bp says that over 60 percent of its European mega data center workloads have migrated to the AWS cloud, including several business critical applications and trading platforms—well ahead of schedule. Shifting to AWS cloud based services reduces bp’s own energy use and emissions from its own digital infrastructure and data centers.
bp’s operations have become increasingly integrated with AWS. Amazon noted in December 2019 that bp’s refineries in its global Downstream business run AVEVA United Supply Chain software, a critical analytics platform, on AWS. The company also uses real-time, streaming data provider Amazon Kinesis for emissions monitoring and gas station pump operations.
As part of its broader digital transformation, bp pointed to several artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning collaborations that it has undertaken with Amazon. These include the migration of bp trading to the Amazon Aurora relational cloud database, and the adoption of Amazon’s QuickSight business intelligence tool for its procurement and supply chain management.
Per bp, relationships with major corporate partners like Amazon are key to its strategy of becoming a net zero energy company by 2050 or sooner.
