Amazon, Google exploring all options for meeting growing power needs

• Amazon and Google are trying to remain nimble as their electricity demands increase steeply during a period of political uncertainty and technological evolution for the energy sector, division heads for the hyperscalers said during a Wednesday panel at the American Council on Renewable Energy’s Finance Forum.
• As Google attempts to meet a goal of operating on 100% carbon-free energy by 2030, the company is making investments in emerging generation sources like geothermal and small modular nuclear reactors in an attempt to accelerate them, said Will Conkling, Google’s head of data center energy, Americas. “But even at Google, we can't wish things to be true, right? We have to deal with the reality of technology and commercialization curves.”
• “It's going to take a mix of everything to really reach the capacity that we need as a nation,” said Jessica Johnson, director of offtake at CleanCapital. “Not just for data centers, but for the entire demand.”

The last five years have been tumultuous for the renewable energy industry, Johnson said, and recently the sector has seen added uncertainty resulting from President Trump’s tariffs as well as a House-passed budget bill that would slash most tax credits included in the Inflation Reduction Act.

As a result, she said many energy buyers that don’t have the resources of Amazon or Google have been “shying away” from renewables and wanting to see “what else is out there.” However, Johnson said, fast-deploying generation like solar and storage still has a place when weighed against resources that are slower to bring online, like nuclear.

Conkling said he doesn’t see the challenge of responding to demand growth from data centers as one that can be met by a one-size-fits-all solution. He said that when there is growth, “the system has always basically looked at … building new gas,” but “I think we have to be careful that we don't over-generalize the solution to the growth question.”

“It's tailored responses to tailored problems,” Conkling said. “When we start to say, ‘well, the grid needs energy, and the solution is X,’ we're papering over a lot of detail and a lot of nuance, that actually probably leads us to the suboptimal.”

For instance, while data center loads on their own are too large to be handled by distributed resources, the deployment of distributed resources across a grid can ease constraints and free up transmission capacity overall, he said.

Conkling said Google’s strategy “is generally to be a grid-tied customer, we see that as being a great benefit to us, and also being very much front and center as being part of the solution for how the grids grow and how Google grows and how the economy grows.”

“We think electricity growth on the system is actually not a threat, it's an opportunity for us and for the country and for utilities and states,” he said. “Infrastructure growth has always been a huge driver of economic growth in this country, and electricity growth on the system has always been a very big indicator of GDP growth, economic growth, and quality of life.”

Craig Sundstrom, Amazon’s Americas head of energy and sustainability public policy, said customers are the ones driving the demand for Amazon’s cloud services — and, as a result, driving the company’s increasing electricity demand.

“But our customers also want [Amazon Web Services] to be clean, which is why nothing's changed in terms of our own commitment to hitting that longer-term target of net zero by 2040,” he said.

Sundstrom said that Amazon sees its role in the energy system as that of a customer, not a project developer, but that the company is — like Google — working to advance new technologies like small modular reactors, “putting capital up for a technology that has still not yet been deployed.”

“I think we're seeing that it's going to take a mix [of generation],” Sundstrom said, and creative solutions to address growing demand.

One example, he said, was Amazon’s partnership with Entergy to service its $10 billion investment in two data center complexes in Mississippi.

“As a utility customer, we rely on them to make decisions around their generation portfolio,” Sundstrom said. “But there was also a lot of creativity baked into that particular transaction as well, where as a customer, we were also able to bring about 650 MW of utility-scale solar onto Entergy’s grid to support our investment there. And I think it's going to take those continued partnerships to ultimately make this happen.”