Washington -Amazon, the global leader in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence, has teamed up with Rivian, an electric vehicle manufacturer, to bring 100,000 custom electric delivery vans to the road by 2030. This was announced by Udit Madan, VP of Transportation at Amazon.
Madan said: “We have already deployed more than 10,000 electric delivery vehicles from Rivian in the U.S., which is the fastest rollout of an electric delivery fleet at this scale in the U.S. These zero-emission vehicles have delivered more than 260 million packages to customers in more than 1,800 cities and regions across the country since last year. We have also installed over 12,000 chargers at 100 delivery stations across the U.S.”
He added: “We have prioritized stations that have higher density routes to reduce our overall carbon intensity faster. This helps us maximize the impact of our zero-emission vehicles on the road every day.”
Regarding Amazon’s renewable efforts, Kara Hurst, VP of Sustainability at Amazon stated: “We are on track to power our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, five years ahead of our initial 2030 target.”
Hurst said that Amazon reached 85% renewable energy across its business by the end of 2021. In 2022, Amazon set a new corporate record for the most renewable energy announced by a single company in one year. The company remains the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy—a position it has held since 2020.
Amazon’s renewable energy portfolio, once fully operational, will eliminate 21.8 million metric tonnes of carbon emissions annually, equivalent to the annual emissions of more than 4.7 million cars in the U.S. each year. She added that Amazon now has a total of 401 renewable energy projects globally.
“Our growth in absolute emissions is down 0.4%, even while our net sales increased (by 9%) – this shows we are learning how to be more efficient while our business grows. We are investing in the right decarbonization strategies. This metric continues to drop (7% in 2022), and since 2019 it has decreased by 24%,” Hurst elaborated. “Our net-zero carbon goal requires large-scale transformation across entire industries, such as transportation and logistics. Currently, Scope 1 accounts for approximately 20% of our overall emissions. We are also investing in solutions like green hydrogen and other alternative fuel methods for our delivery and operations, in addition to electrification.”
She continued: “We are partners in industry-wide coalitions, such as coZEV (Cargo Owners for Zero Emission Vessels), which we helped launch, and the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance (SABA), which is focused on increasing investment in sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). We also recently co-founded the Zero Emission Maritime Buyers Alliance (ZEMBA), an initiative of coZEV. The mission of ZEMBA is to enable companies to access zero-emission shipping solutions that are not currently available.
