‘Use no more than what you need’: How Amazon reached the top of India’s green energy market

Amazon Solar Farm in Rajasthan, India.Amazon Solar Farm in Rajasthan, India.

Synopsis
Amazon has become the largest buyer of renewable energy in India, and is on track to meet its 100% renewable goal target by 2025 globally. Amazon's rapid sign-up of seven utility-scale renewable energy projects since September 2022 has taken the market by surprise. However, Amazon’s early days in the corporate renewable energy market in India were not without some teething issues.

In 2020, when Ken Haig, head of energy and environmental policy at AWS for Asia Pacific and Japan, landed the job, the tasks at hand appeared daunting. Understandably so, as AWS, the cloud computing business of Amazon, is a large consumer of energy for powering its servers and search engines. Just a few months before Haig’s appointment, the technology major, as part of The Climate Pledge initiative announced in October 2019, had made a public