Which companies are the most active buyers of renewable energy? The answer might be a surprise, since these major firms are also some of the biggest energy users in the world.

Renewable energy, often referred to as clean energy, comes from a variety of natural sources, such as solar, geothermal, wind and hydropower, and major cloud providers have become significant customers in the renewable energy market.

“AWS and other cloud providers have been buying renewable energy to the point where they are some of the biggest buyers in the world,” said Adrian Cockcroft (pictured), partner and analyst at Orion Enterprise Inc. and former Amazon Web Services Inc. exec. “There’s a wind farm or solar farm that’s totally dedicated to AWS. They paid for it to exist, and they take all the energy from it and count it against their total usage of energy. All of the cloud providers are doing that.”

Cockcroft spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and John Furrier at the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how the tech industry can build a more sustainable future.

Aggressive timelines

Since his retirement from AWS in 2022, Cockcroft has been participating in a number of sustainability projects. Some of these include helping companies reach net-zero status, a balance between the amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced and the amount removed from the atmosphere. A number of companies have publicly committed to a timeline for reaching net-zero goals.

“The general industry commitment is net-zero 2050,” Cockcroft said. “Most of the cloud providers have a 2030 goal, a little more aggressive. And AWS, I think, is still under 2025 when they say they’ll get to 100%.”

A global push to control carbon emissions in the atmosphere has spurred regulatory activity. This is leading businesses in a number of industries to adopt net-zero goals and seek to use more renewable energy,

“There’s regulation coming; we’ve got regulation now on the books in Europe and California,” Cockcroft said. “You’re going to have to disclose carbon and conform to various reporting requirements. We have audit requirements that mean you have to figure out what your carbon footprint is just to do business. More and more people are doing it voluntarily in advance of the regulations.”

Coming regulatory requirements and a push for more sustainable operations have led to the creation of new tools for managing power consumption. One of these is Project Kepler, Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter, under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

“I need to allocate and attribute all of the carbon data, and that’s what Kepler does,” Cockcroft said. “I need to take my workload, I need to allocate all of the bits of the workload to customers. It will tell you the power consumption of your workload on Kubernetes, which is awesome.”

Cockcroft is also an active participant in the Green Software Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the creation of software using fewer greenhouse gases. He has been working on an initiative to create a real-time energy and carbon standard for cloud providers.

“You can go to GitHub and find the real-time-cloud project on the Green Software Foundation and see what we’re doing,” Cockcroft said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE