Amazon Announces Largest Renewable Energy Project To Date
Amazon Web Services has announced its largest renewable energy project to date, a 208 MW wind farm that will supply current and future Amazon cloud data centers.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is responsible for hosting many of the internet’s most popular websites, where “the cloud” most assuredly meets the ground in one of thousands, if not millions of data centers around the world. AWS announced in November that it intends to achieve 100% renewable energy usage for its global infrastructure, and in April 2015 AWS announced that approximately 25% of the power consumed by its global infrastructure was already being generated from renewable energy sources, and that it intends to increase that figure to 40% by the end of 2016.
Towards that goal, AWS announced on Monday a contract with Iberdrola Renewables to construct a 208 MW wind farm in Perquimans and Pasquotank counties, North Carolina, called the Amazon Wind Farm US East.
Wind Farm US East is set to start generating 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. However, instead of just powering homes, Wind Farm US East — the first utility-scale wind farm in the state of North Carolina — will generate electricity for both current and future AWS Cloud data centers.
