Does Amazon Know What it's Doing?
The company has more than 600 wind and solar farms worldwide. Ever wonder why?
Amazon has been the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for more than five years in a row.
In 2024, it helped build the first wind project in Greece.1 In 2025, it announced three more wind projects in that country.2 In December of 2025, the Borkum Riffgrund 3 offshore wind farm (the second-largest offshore wind farm in Germany, just by a hair) began sending power to the German grid, to consumers including Amazon and Google.3 It has well over 600 renewables projects around the world - and more are under construction.4
Does Amazon know what it’s doing? Yeah. That’s a pretty safe bet.
Power Play: Electricity is Currency
Companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have been building their own power production facilities for more than a decade. Why? Because those companies employ some pretty smart cookies, and they know that they’re going to need energy to keep the lights on at their businesses.
And we’re facing a shortage.
Some of the largest, most profitable companies in the world have looked into the future, and decided to do something about it - to make sure their businesses continue to run.
Hey, the good news is that they’ll be around to sell us batteries for our flashlights. We’ll probably need them.
Cue the Fossil Fuel Contingent
It’s easy to say things that aren’t true, and since it’s hard for the average person to look into the subject of fossil fuels to draw their own conclusions so they can ask good questions of coal proponents when they say, “wind energy only works when the wind is blowing” and “solar energy? Ha! What do you do at night?!”
But the fact is, it’s faster to build wind and solar generating plants than it is to build new coal power plants. And we repeat for those who didn’t digest it earlier:
We’re facing an energy shortage.
The [Borkum Riffgrund 3] project will consist of a total of 83 wind turbines, each with a rated capacity of 11 MW. The companies note that when it is fully operational, it will produce the same amount of electricity that a large city uses every year. - Maritime Executive, Dec 4 2025
83 wind turbines, powering a large city.
Sure, Amazon is Concerned about the Climate
We’re not here to cast disparaging remarks about the world’s largest companies or to question why they’ve invested so much in wind and solar (and to a lesser extent, nuclear power).
It’s quite likely that they do feel a great deal of pride in their contribution to the energy transition. But let’s be careful to not characterize it as a contribution. It’s about profits. Companies like those mentioned here - and others, like Berkshire Hathaway, Tesla, and ExxonMobile, to name a few - have seen the writing on the wall and they’re doing something about it.
Who’s going to run out of energy? Not them.
If your local (or national) government isn’t interested in figuring out how to use renewables to make electricity, don’t worry. It’s possible Google or Amazon will let you buy some of theirs.
We’re not here to create controversy; we just really, really like having enough electricity to keep the lights on. Coal served us well for 100 years or so - yes, it’s dirty, but it works - and now that we know what we know, it’s time for us to move to a YES, AND approach to energy. Wind, solar, hydro and nuclear work. It’s time to catch up with the rest of the world (US, we’re looking at you) and plan accordingly.
If you want to learn more about wind and other forms of renewable energy, check out the Uptime Wind Energy Network. We produce three podcasts each week, and you can subscribe to our free newsletter here.
Source: Power Magazine, January 2025 https://www.powermag.com/amazon-supports-three-new-wind-farms-in-greece/
Source: Maritime Executive, December 2025 https://maritime-executive.com/article/wind-farm-to-power-amazon-and-google-sends-first-power-to-german-grid