Amazon is the largest global blue-chip company to publicly support green energy with a significant private investment with the announcement that it will be equipping fifty of its warehouses with solar panels in the next four years.

The retail giant has selected fifty of its global warehouse locations, with the first fifteen being equipped with solar PV panels in the USA this year. Together, they will produce up to 41MW of clean and renewable power. When conditions are optimised, Amazon believes that the warehouses could meet as much as 80pc of their total power needs every year through solar energy.

The first warehouses chosen for the investment are located in Delaware, California, New Jersey, Maryland and Nevada.

A spokesman for the company said that Amazon was looking to deploy its culture of innovation and its vast business scale to make gains in the sustainability field, providing benefits for the climate, for customers and for the business as a whole. He explained that by diversifying the Amazon energy portfolio, the business could lower its operating costs and pass on cost savings to its customer base.

Amazon has already announced that it was America's biggest corporate buyer of green energy in 2016 and that its projects to date will combine to produce 3.6 million MW of clean energy, helping to drive forward the move to a more sustainable economy.

The announcement will directly challenge President Trump, who has spoken out against clean energy, saying that he plans to invest in fossil fuels once again. However, if corporate America's hugely influential brands continue their own drive towards clean energy investment - including Silicon Valley tech giants - Trump may find that his policies take second place to market economics and the ever growing power of clean energy.