Amazon is reportedly in talks with Japanese power companies and trading houses to build its first renewable energy power plant in the country.
AWS has seven data centers across two cloud regions in Japan in Tokyo and Osaka, and is looking to source renewable energy to power the facilities and help the company achieve its sustainability goals.
Nikkei reports a Japanese trading house (large conglomerate companies, also known as Sogo shosha) is hoping to bid for an offshore wind power plant project near Akita prefecture that would supply electricity to Amazon, while Amazon is also in talks with power companies to build a new solar power plant.
Amazon told Nikkei that the company will purchase from new power plants on an exclusive basis rather than procure renewable energy from existing providers.
According to the US Energy Information Administration, around 10 percent of Japan’s energy comes from renewable sources. The country relies heavily on oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG), but the Japanese Government has set a target of 22-24 percent of the country’s energy coming from renewable sources by 2030.
Amazon recently announced it was now producing 8.5GW of renewable energy across more than 200 projects globally and is due to reach 100 percent renewable energy by 2025; ahead of its original target of 2030.
While the company has dozens of renewable projects in the US and Europe, it has just two in Asia. The company has a 100MW solar farm in development in Shandong, China, as well as a 50MW solar project in Singapore in partnership with Sunseap Group.
