Amazon Web Services has added another major wind power project to its growing stable of U.S. renewable energy systems.
AWS has partnered with Iberdrola Renewables to commission the 208 megawatt Amazon Wind Farm US East, North Carolina’s first utility-scale wind facility.
Upon completion in 2016, Amazon Wind Farm East will begin generating 670,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity from 104 turbines each year, enough to power 61,000 American homes. According to Iberdrola Renewables, the farm has the capacity to expand to 300 MW and 150 turbines if fully built out, and will inject over US$1.1 million each year in taxes for the local community.
In 2014, AWS committed to achieving a 100 per cent renewable energy goal for running its global cloud-based web services business. As of April 2015, the company had reached the 25 per cent mark, and has announced that the completion of Amazon Wind Farm East will increase that percentage to at least 40 per cent.
“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,” said Jerry Hunter, Vice President of Infrastructure at Amazon Web Services.
The project is the latest in a string of large-scale wind and solar investments by AWS across the U.S., including the 150MW Fowler Ridge Wind Farm in Benton County, Indiana and the 80MW Amazon Solar Farm East in Virginia.
In April, AWS announced a 4.8 MWh pilot of Tesla’s energy storage batteries in its US West (Northern California) Region to help bridge the gap between intermittent production, from sources such as wind and solar.
In a push to sway policymakers to support more renewable power sources for America’s booming cloud-services industry, AWS has joined the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) and the U.S. Partnership for Renewable Energy Finance (US PREF).
“We’re far from being done,” Mr. Hunter said. “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.”
