Amazon announces major North Carolina wind project
Amazon Web Services is launching its biggest clean energy project so far and 208 MW wind farm will power cloud data centres
Amazon Web Services is launching its biggest clean energy project so far and the 208 MW wind farm in the United States will power Amazon cloud data centres.
AWS, the cloud services subsidiary of Seattle-based Amazon, announced in November that it is targeting 100 per cent renewable energy usage for its global infrastructure.
AWS also said in April 2015 that about 25 per cent of the energy used by its global infrastructure was already coming from renewables, and that it is aiming to increase that figure to 40 per cent by the end of 2016.
The firm announced on Monday that a deal has been agreed with Iberdrola Renewables to construct the Amazon Wind Farm US East 208 MW wind farm in North Carolina.
The wind farm will generate 670,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of wind energy annually starting December 2016, which equates to approximately enough electricity to supply more than 61,000 US homes annually.
The application will be the first utility-scale wind farm in North Carolina and will produce electricity for current and future AWS Cloud data centres.
Jerry Hunter, Vice President of Infrastructure at Amazon Web Services, said: “This agreement, and those previously in place, puts AWS on track to surpass our goal of 40 per cent renewable energy globally by the end of 2016. We’re far from being done. We’ll continue pursuing projects that deliver clean energy to the various energy grids that serve AWS data centres, we’ll continue working with our power providers to increase their renewable energy quotient, and we’ll continue to strongly encourage our partners in government to extend the tax incentives that make it more viable for renewable projects to get off the ground.”
Amazon announced in January that it will invest in a project to build the Amazon Wind Farm in Benton County, Indiana, which is expected to generate 500,000 MWh of wind electricity annually.
The Fowler Ridge project is scheduled to begin construction in July and Siemens was announced as the technology provider for the project.