Amazon Pledges for 3 New Wind Farms To Power Its Web Services

Online retail giant Amazon announced three new renewable energy projects as part of its long-term goal to power all Amazon Web Services (AWS) global infrastructure with renewable energy. Three projects include one in the U.S., another in Ireland and in Sweden. These projects will deliver wind-generated energy that will total over 229 MW of power, with expected generation of over 670,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of renewable energy annually.

After completion, these projects combined with AWS’s previous nine renewable energy projects, will generate more than 2,700,000 MWh of renewable energy annually – equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of over 262,000 U.S. homes, which is approximately the size of the city of Nashville, Tennessee.

“Each of these projects brings us closer to our long-term commitment to use 100% renewable energy to power our global AWS infrastructure,” said Peter DeSantis, Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, Amazon Web Services. “These projects are well-positioned to serve AWS data centers in Ireland, Sweden, and the U.S. We expect more projects in 2019 as we continue toward our goal of powering all AWS global infrastructure with renewable energy.”

Amazon has committed to buying the energy from a new wind project in Ireland, a 91.2 MW wind farm in Donegal. The Donegal wind farm project is expected to deliver clean energy no later than the end of 2021.

Amazon will also purchase 91 MW of power from a new wind farm in Bäckhammar, Sweden, which is expected to deliver renewable energy by the end of 2020.

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California leads the United States in renewable electricity generation from non-hydroelectric sources, and the state’s Tehachapi Mountains, where AWS’s wind farm will be located, contain some of the largest wind farms in the country. The wind farm project in Tehachapi is expected to bring up to 47 MW of new renewable energy capacity by the end of 2020.

The news comes after Greenpeace USA last month released a report entitled, Clicking Clean Virginia – The Dirty Energy Powering Data Center Alley, which stated that Amazon and other cloud computing giants in Virginia’s “Data Center Alley” were failing to meet commitments to power their data centers with 100% renewable energy. To which the retailer responded saying that, “AWS remains firmly committed to achieving 100% renewable energy across our global network, achieving 50% renewable energy in 2018. We have a lot of exciting initiatives planned for 2019 as we work towards our goal and are nowhere near done.” As of December 2018, Amazon and AWS have invested in 53 renewable energy projects (six of which are in Virginia), totaling over 1,016 MW and are expected to deliver over 3,075,636 million megawatt-hours (MWh) of energy annually.