Corporates helping to speed renewables rollout: Amazon energy chief

Corporates can help speed the renewables rollout by handing developers a quicker route to market for projects than public auctions, says Amazon’s head of energy in Europe.

The 8.8GW of capacity bought by Amazon in 2023, which is aiming to power its operations with 100% green energy by next year, is more than the entire power generation fleet of countries including Belgium and Chile.

“Rather than waiting for an auction window to open,” and then waiting even longer for the outcome of that process, developers “might be able to move faster with a PPA off-taker,” she said.

“At AWS, we provide an alternate offtake route,” said McQuade, who joined Amazon in 2022 after working as CEO of ScottishPower Renewables, a subsidiary of Spain’s Iberdrola.

“PPAs are still relatively young in Europe,” she said, but she said people may now be becoming “more comfortable” with it as a model.

“Five, seven years ago in Europe,” she said if a corporate had put out a request for proposal for a PPA people would have asked: “Well how does that work?”

McQuade stressed it is not either, or when for developers when deciding what route to take their project, which can have an auction mechanism “sitting side by side to a PPA, or a group of PPAs”.

There is an element of “competition” between the public and private sectors when it comes to producing renewable energy, said McQuade, with a “finite pool of projects coming through”.

PPAs Amazon proposes need to be “competitive” against rates offered in public auctions, which will continue to be important going forward, said McQuade. “We’re there as a complement to that.”