Eneco produces renewable energy to Amazon’s facilities in EU According to Nikkei, Eneco will produce renewable energy to Amazon’s facilities in Europe. Mitsubishi Corporation, which is one of the Japanese […]
According to Nikkei, Eneco will produce renewable energy to Amazon’s facilities in Europe. Mitsubishi Corporation, which is one of the Japanese largest trading companies, owns Eneco. The company will produce energy by offshore wind turbines that are built by Eneco. The announcement implies that the renewable energy will be able to meet the power needs of Amazon facilities including its European data center. The wind energy will start operating in 2023. Furthermore, an annual output of the energy generators will reach 760,000 kW, and 130,000 kW for Amazon’s facilities. This amount is equal to about 150,000 households.
Eneco is a producer and suppliers of natural gas, electricity and heat in the Netherlands. Mitsubishi and Chubu Electric Power of Japan hold its 80% and 20% of its stake, respectively. Based on Eneco’s homepage, its mission is “Everyone’s Sustainable Energy”. The Dutch company offers innovative energy solutions, and affordable products and services to make it easy and effortless for customers.
Eneco has 5 business units. They are Eneco New Energy, Eneco Energy Trade, Eneco Netherlands, Eneco Installation Companies and Eneco International. For example, Eneco New Energy is responsible for sustainable energy generation and sustainable energy projects. In fact, the company’s activities has strong correlation with the Paris Accord.
According to Amazon’s sustainability page, the American IT giant tries to power its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025. This is a part of its goal to be carbon neutral by 2040. In 2019, renewable energy accounted for 42% of energy across its business. Even though Amazon’s ambitious actions are still on the way, the number is already huge. As of December 2020, the American IT giant has 127 renewable energy projects across the globe that have the capacity to generate over 6,500 megawatts and deliver more than 18 million megawatt hours of energy annually. The amount is equal to 1.7 million U.S. homes and more.
In other article, as we discussed, Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance are the three key factors in measuring the sustainability and societal impact of an investment in a company or business now. When it comes to sustainability and social impact, coal power generation is not worth investing. This is because coal power generation emits more greenhouse gas than renewable energy or nuclear power generation.
What’s more, carbon neutrality is not our ideal but our mandatory goal for our future as well as current generations. Therefore, if companies want to continue power coal generations, it does not make sense. To make matters worse, they are more difficult to finance or gain support from stakeholders.
In fact, according to Larry Fink’s 2020 Letter to CEOs, Larry Fink, who is the CEO of BlackRock (an American multinational investment management corporation) stated that the company will exit investments that present a high sustainability-related risk, such as thermal coal producers. Thus, the announcement in Mitsubishi is not surprised and reasonable in this sense.
