Amazon Web Services, Inc. has signed a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) for the output of a 150 megawatt wind farm to be constructed in Benton County, Indiana.
To be called the Amazon Web Services Wind Farm (Fowler Ridge); the facility is expected to generate approximately 500,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of clean electricity a year – enough to power 46,000 US homes.
“Amazon Web Services Wind Farm (Fowler Ridge) will bring a new source of clean energy to the electric grid where we currently operate a large number of datacenters and have ongoing expansion plans to support our growing customer base,” said Jerry Hunter, Vice President of Infrastructure at Amazon Web Services.
Pattern Energy Group LP ( Pattern Development ) will be building the facility. The company currently owns and operates twelve wind power projects in the United States, Canada and Chile with a total capacity of 1,636 MW.
“We are excited to be working with Amazon Web Services and we commend the Company for its commitment to sustainability and its continued pioneering and leadership in cloud computing. We look forward to working with AWS as it progresses towards its goal of using 100 percent renewable energy,” said Pattern Development’s CEO, Mike Garland .
AWS began offering IT infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services – now commonly known as cloud computing – in 2006. The company says AWS Infrastructure uses rack-optimized systems that use less than 1/8th the energy of the blade server enclosures that are often used in corporate datacenters.
While cloud computing may generally be more environmentally friendly than traditional computing; these types of services collectively still have a significant carbon footprint.
A Greenpeace report published in 2014 claimed IT-related services account for 2% of all global carbon emissions. Greenpeace says that if the cloud computing industry were a country, it would be 6th largest electricity consumer in the world. At that point in time, Greenpeace assessed Amazon Web Services clean energy supply at 15%.
In November last year Amazon announced a long-term commitment of 100 percent renewable energy usage for the global AWS infrastructure footprint. The company says it already has three AWS Regions that are carbon-neutral – US West (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt), and AWS GovCloud (US).
