Iberdrola, one of the world’s largest clean energy companies, and Amazon have announced a new global collaboration to support the development of large-scale renewable energy projects and leverage cloud computing technology to enhance digitalisation in the energy transition.
The two companoes have agreed to collaborate on new wind and solar capacity by signing power purchase agreements (PPA) for projects in Europe, the U.S. and Asia-Pacific. The agreements will help Amazon stay on path to power its operations with 100 per cent renewable energy by 2025 – five years ahead of its original 2030 commitment.
Two of Iberdrola’s offshore windfarms in Germany (Baltic Eagle and Windanker) will provide Amazon with 1.1 terawatt-hours (TWh) of clean energy each year, which is equivalent to the annual electricity needs of more than 314,000 European homes.
Baltic Eagle is located in the Baltic Sea, north of the island of Rügen and will have a total capacity of 476 megawatts (MW) when completed in 2024. Windanker, also located in the Baltic Sea, will have 300 MW of installed capacity and will be completed in 2026. The projects form part of Iberdrola’s Baltic Hub, which will have a total capacity of 1,100 MW, making it one of the largest offshore wind clusters in the region.
In addition to the agreement with Amazon for renewable energy, Iberdrola has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred cloud provider. AWS will support the energy company as it embarks on further digitalisation to support smarter grids, customer engagement, and connected clean power.
“The challenge of electrifying our energy system to increase our autonomy and reduce emissions requires partnerships between leaders like Iberdrola and Amazon. The agreement, combining sun, wind, and cloud, will enable new renewable generation capacity around the world and accelerate the digital revolution in the energy sector,” said Aitor Moso, Director of Iberdrola’s Retail Business. “AWS technologies will support our digital strategy to continue increasing quality of supply and provide cleaner and fully-interconnected energy services for our customers.”
“Iberdrola and AWS believe that innovation is key to achieving our sustainability goals and accelerating the world’s energy transition,” said Matt Garman, Senior Vice President of Sales, Marketing, and Global Services at AWS. “AWS provides the reliability, scale, and cost-efficient IT infrastructure that will allow Iberdrola to optimise renewable energy production, modernise the power grid to integrate renewable energy sources, and enhance visibility across its operations. Together, we will advance the adoption of renewable energy and help Amazon stay on a path to power its operations with 100 per cent renewable energy and reach net-zero carbon emissions.”
Through this collaboration Iberdrola will benefit from the recently launched AWS Europe (Spain) Region and AWS cloud services to drive the energy company’s ambitious digitalisation transformation plans. This includes collaborating on multiple sustainability-focused projects.
For example, the companies are developing an Advanced Smart Assistant application that will empower Iberdrola customers to take an active role in the energy transition. The application leverages services like AWS Lambda—a serverless, event-driven compute service for running code without provisioning or managing servers—and Amazon SageMaker—an AWS service that helps customers build, train, and deploy machine learning models—to facilitate the connectivity to devices like electric vehicle (EV) chargers and solar panels and controls them autonomously to reduce energy bills and carbon footprint.
Other projects include renewable energy production optimization and smart grid innovations like helping to develop the electricity substation of the future using Internet of Things (IoT) and digital twins.
