Last year, Amazon was forced to turn off solar power generation systems at all of its US facilities – a large number of them, for various reasons, had fires that jeopardized the e-commerce giant’s environmental program.
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One of these incidents occurred on April 14, 2020 – a fire was recorded on the roof of a FAT1 warehouse in Fresno, California. Then about 220 solar panels and other electrical equipment were damaged, but firefighters who arrived at the scene were able to cope with the fire. About a year later, a similar incident was recorded at an Amazon facility in Perryville, Maryland. Between these two events, four more fires were recorded in the warehouses of the company, according to internal documents of Amazon, which journalists were able to see. CNBC. In other words, from April 2020 to June 2021. 6 of the company’s 47 solar-equipped sites in North America experienced major outages—that is, 12.7% of its order processing centers.
It would be a mistake to think that only Amazon is experiencing such problems: in one form or another, they have affected all companies trying to implement environmental programs, reducing their environmental impact and reducing dependence on fossil fuels. Although Amazon may have been the most active along the way. In 2019, its founder, Jeff Bezos, promised to take the company to zero emissions by 2040, including introducing renewable energy sources and abandoning combustion vans.
Last June, Amazon had to turn off solar power generation at all facilities in the US – the company’s management decided to make sure that all systems are designed, deployed and maintained properly in order to re-commission them. Company spokeswoman Erika Howard told CNBC that technical failures occurred on systems managed by her partners, and Amazon made the decision to disable them on its own initiative. However, all this information was not in the company’s official environmental reports – it said that in mid-2021, 90 order processing centers were provided with energy from solar panels, by the end of the year there were 115, and in April 2022 – already 176. energy was launched in 2017.
From the published reports, the company also excluded information about the costs incurred in such incidents. But one Amazon employee calculated that the average cost is $2.7 million per major outage, including the costs of technical inspections and the repair or replacement of faulty equipment. On the other hand, downtime of solar panels is also expensive – $20,000 for each of the 47 American facilities per month, or $940,000 for all combined.
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Technical inspections for Amazon are carried out by its partner, Clean Energy Associates (CEA). She is entrusted with the inspection of objects not only in the United States, but also in other regions of the presence of the retailer: in Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East and Africa. Moreover, CEA worked not only with Amazon facilities, but also with the centers of its Whole Foods network. As of the end of 2021, four years after the takeover of the supermarket chain, the new owner still did not have a technical report on the state of renewable energy systems at Whole Foods facilities. However, the report submitted to the CEA at the end of 2021 contained 259 standard comments and one critical note. The concerns included mismatched connectors between modules, misplaced connectors, wiring maintenance errors, and signs of water intrusion into solar-to-electricity inverters. By the way, a fire inspector in Fresno concluded that the fire at the FAT1 facility “originated at or near two inverters.”
It seems that the end of 2021 was a turning point in this story – then Amazon divisions asked the company’s management for funding in the amount of $3.6 million to conduct repeated technical inspections that would establish that solar energy systems can be put back into operation. Employees have also called on management to reduce Amazon’s reliance on outside suppliers and replace them with in-house workers. Over time, the company has indeed begun to hire more solar specialists for offices around the world.
However, in some cases, the leadership reacted unacceptably slowly. A number of departments have asked “upstairs” to approve plans to hire, re-inspect and restart solar systems, and in response, Kara Hurst, Amazon’s vice president of environmental affairs, and Alicia Boler-Davis, the senior vice president of customer service suspended all work in this area for several months. In June 2022, Hirst and Boler-Davies left the company.
At the official level, Amazon, of course, denies that members of the management are delaying work at the request of employees – solar energy specialists are still on the company’s job listings. Now Amazon management understands that the change of environmental strategy at the colossal scale of operations is inevitably fraught with obstacles. “But we at Amazon don’t shy away from big challenges. We don’t have all the answers today, but we believe in the need to act now,” wrote Cara Hirst in a cover letter to the 2021 Environmental Report.
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