The answer to this depends on which AWS region you are operating in.
In July 2023, Amazon published an updated edition of their Sustainability Report. In it, they have disclosed several regions where annual energy consumption is 100% attributable to renewable energy. Those regions are:
- U.S. East (Northern Virginia) –
us-east-1 - GovCloud (U.S. East)
- U.S. East (Ohio) –
us-east-2 - U.S. West (Oregon) –
us-west-2 - GovCloud (U.S. West)
- U.S. West (Northern California) –
us-west-1 - Canada (Central) –
ca-central-1 - Europe (Ireland) –
eu-west-1 - Europe (Frankfurt) –
eu-central-1 - Europe (London) –
eu-west-2 - Europe (Milan) –
eu-south-1 - Europe (Paris) –
eu-west-3 - Europe (Stockholm) –
eu-north-1 - Europe (Spain) –
eu-south-2 - Europe (Zurich) –
eu-central-2 - Asia-Pacific (Mumbai) –
ap-south-1 - Asia-Pacific (Hyderabad) –
ap-south-2 - China (Beijing)
- China (Ningxia)
These claims of 100% renewable energy at the locations above are supported by a limited independent third party assurance from Ernst and Young.
As such, if you are a green hosting provider that is using one of the locations listed above, then you may use that as supporting evidence for your verification request application.
I use one of those regions, why doesn’t my site show as green?
We are in the process of updating our automated scripts which process data on AWS regions (also called our AWS importer) to reflect these changes. That will take some time, in order for us to ensure we’ve got the correct regions and IP ranges mapped.
Until that update is made, websites hosted in these regions which are checked using our Green Web Checker or GreenCheck API will still show as not green.
To follow the progress of updating our AWS importer, or if you would like to make a contribution, please check this issue on Github. As a non-profit, we rely on external funding to allow work like this to happen. If you’d like to support our work in this space, please visit our donations page.
I operate in more than one AWS region
In this case, you can still be verified as a green hosting provider, however you must show additional evidence to demonstrate steps you are taking to avoid, reduce or offset the greenhouse gas emissions caused using electricity to provide the service.
For example, if you are using eu-south-1 (100% renewable region) and ap-east-1 (not 100% renewable), then we would need evidence of the actions you are taking in ap-east-1 to avoid, reduce or offset the additional greenhouse gas emissions from your operations in that region.