Business

Akamai today announced its carbon reduction commitment to reduce the company’s absolute greenhouse gas emissions below 2015 levels by sourcing renewable energy for 50 percent of its network operations by 2020. Decarbonizing global operations by putting more renewable energy on the electrical grid is a critical next step in Akamai’s sustainability journey to reduce its environmental impact. Akamai has had great success in decoupling its exponential business growth from energy and carbon impacts through network productivity and efficiency gains. However, its global operations will always require energy, highlighting the importance of procuring renewables to offset carbon-intensive, grid electricity.

Akamai is implementing a renewable energy procurement strategy focused on motivating the expansion of renewable energy markets and could provide a model for other companies with highly-distributed and less energy-intensive operations. The company has announced a commitment to long term investment in renewable energy projects, geographically aligned with network operations and commensurate with aggregate network energy usage that includes third-party, colocation data centers.

The company plans to enter into long term agreements with developers to purchase electricity from new projects at a fixed-price, retiring the bundled renewable energy certificates. These agreements are structured to help developers secure financing for projects that might otherwise not have been built. Following this strategy, it is expected that by 2020 Akamai’s global network operations will cover 50 percent of electricity consumption using renewable energy, and lower carbon emissions below 2015 levels, despite a potential 45 percent increase in network traffic. For more details about this initiative, please visit the Akamai blog.

“I’m proud of, and excited about, Akamai’s strong commitment to addressing this important sustainability challenge,” said Noam Freedman, senior vice president of networks, Akamai. “Our customers are going clean and green and we want to help them go faster forward with a low-carbon-powered, global delivery network.”

Devon Leahy, Director of Sustainability and Social Innovation at Etsy, agreed with this point, “The ability to get clean-powered, low-carbon content delivery from Akamai is a powerful way to extend our own sustainability initiatives.”

Akamai’s sustainability efforts have been recognized by a number of recent industry reports including The A List: The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) Climate Performance Leadership Index (CPLI) for 2014, the CDP S&P 500 Climate Change Report 2014 and the Dow Jones Sustainability Index North America. The company’s highly-distributed CDN is deployed with more than 210,000 servers in 120 countries and within more than 1,450 global networks. The company delivers more than two trillion daily Internet interactions.