German utility RWE and tech giant Amazon announce partnership

PARIS (Reuters) -German utility RWE and tech giant Amazon announced a strategic framework agreement on Thursday, where the utility will provide clean power delivery and in exchange receive cloud services.

The cloud services cover artificial intelligence and data analytics in exchange for electricity supplied from RWE's wind and solar facilities, some of which are already in operation and some are under construction.

CONTEXT

RWE is a major utility in Europe with a large portfolio of renewable energy both in operation and in development which it can then sell to Amazon or other data centre hyperscalers to help companies reach green energy targets.

The partnership announcement is a start, with ties expected to develop and deepen between the two companies, RWE said.

KEY QUOTES

"(The strategic partnership) enables us to focus and look at longer term options in more detail," said Simon Stanton, RWE's head of Global Partnerships and Transactions.

    These longer-term options include the development of renewables, power purchase agreements, and enabling the build out of AWS's data centre infrastructure, he added.

"Advancing digitalization and electrification are also driving up demand for electricity," Chief Commercial Officer of RWE Supply & Trading, Ulf Kerstin, said.

"Our competitive portfolio of renewable and flexible energy generation is ideally suited to meet this demand," he added.

BY THE NUMBERS

Amazon has contracted around 1.1 gigawatts of renewable energy across seven power purchase agreements with RWE in the United States, the statement said.

RWE's Supply & Trading division has also migrated mission-critical applications to AWS cloud services, including their Energy Trading and Risk Management platform enabling 30% performance improvements with end-of-day runtimes, it said.

WHAT'S NEXT

Going forward Amazon will support RWE's continued innovation in trading, commercial asset optimization including renewables, and energy AI applications, the announcement said.

The collaboration will deepen ties to RWE's AI Research Laboratory in Seattle to accelerate the development of advanced AI forecasting models through large computational power and cloud elasticity, it said.

(Reporting by Forrest Crellin; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)