Amazon signs Indiana wind farm deal as it targets 100pc clean energy
Amazon Web Services is to buy electricity from a 150MW wind farm in the state of Indiana in the United States to power its data centres
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is to buy electricity from a 150MW wind farm in the state of Indiana in the United States to power its data centres.
AWS made a "long term commitment" in 2014 to use 100 per cent renewable energy for its "global infrastructure footprint" and has teamed up with Pattern Energy Group to support the development and operation of the new wind farm in Benton County.
Amazon has signed the power purchase agreement as part its target to source 100 per cent of its energy from renewable sources.
The Amazon Web Services Wind Farm (Fowler Ridge) will produce around 500,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of wind power annually which is enough to power approximately 46,000 U.S. homes.
The commitment came after climate campaign group Greenpeace questioned why the company had not followed the example set by rivals Apple and Microsoft in using more clean energy.
AWS has taken steps previously to reduce its environmental impact and introduced it’s first "carbon-neutral region", US West (Oregon), in 2011 with two further regions added subsequently - EU (Frankfurt) and AWS GovCloud (US).
The firm has a significant global data centre network, supplying cloud services globally to over 1 million customers from data centre locations in the US, Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, Ireland, Japan, and Singapore.
Under the terms of the deal, AWS will buy energy from the new wind farm under a power purchase agreement when it starts generating in January 2016.
Jerry Hunter, Vice-President of infrastructure at AWS said: "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 data centres and have ongoing expansion plans to support our growing customer base. This PPA helps to increase the renewable energy used to power our infrastructure in the US and is one of many sustainability activities and renewable energy projects for powering our data centres that we currently have in the works."
