What Happened After Amazon Electrified Its Delivery Fleet?

Bloomberg looks at America's biggest operator of private electrical vehicle charging infrastructure: Amazon. "In a little more than two years, Amazon has installed more than 17,000 chargers at about 120 warehouses around the U.S." - and had Rivian build 13,500 custom electric delivery vans.Amazon has a long way to go. The Seattle-based company says its operations emitted about 71 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2022, up by almost 40% since Jeff Bezos's 2019 vow that his company would eventually stop contributing to the emissions warming the planet. Many of Amazon's emissions come from activities - air freight, ocean shipping, construction and electronics manufacturing, to name a few - that lack a clear, carbon-free alternative, today or any time soon. The company has not made much progress on decarbonization of long-haul trucking, whose emissions tend to be concentrated in industrial and outlying areas rather than the big cities that served as the backdrop for Amazon's electric delivery vehicle rollout... Another lesson Amazon learned is one the company isn't keen to talk about: Going green can be expensive, at least initially. Based on the type of chargers Amazon deploys - almost entirely midtier chargers called Level 2 in the industry - the hardware likely cost between $50 million and $90 million, according to Bloomberg estimates based on cost estimates supplied by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Factoring in costs beyond the plugs and related hardware - like digging through a parking lot to lay wires or set up electrical panels and cabinets - could double that sum. Amazon declined to comment on how much it spent on its EV charging push. In addition to the expense of the chargers, electric vehicle-fleet operators are typically on the hook for utility upgrades. When companies request the sort of increases to electrical capacity that Amazon has - the Maple Valley warehouse has three megawatts of power for its chargers - they tend to pay for them, making the utility whole for work done on behalf of a single customer. Amazon says it pays upgrade costs as determined by utilities, but that in some locations the upgrades fit within the standard service power companies will handle out of their own pocket. The article also includes this quote from Kellen Schefter, transportation director at the Edison Electric Institute trade group (which worked with Amazon on its electricity needs). "Amazon's scale matters. If Amazon can show that it meets their climate goals while also meeting their package-delivery goals, we can show this all actually works."

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