Amazon Web Services has contracted green energy specialist EDP Renewables to build and run the 100 megawatt (MW) Amazon Wind Farm US Central in Ohio.
The project is due to complete by May 2017 when it will begin producing enough to power run, 29,000 average US homes for a year, it claims. AWS says the latest addition to its green energy stable would generate 320,000 MWh of electricity a year from a new wind farm in the US.
Amazon also claims the energy generated will feed the electrical grid supplying both current and future AWS cloud data centres.
In November 2014 AWS committed to running its infrastructure entirely on renewable energy – in the long term – and claimed that 25% of the electricity running its cloud services was green. By the end of 2016 it aims to have pushed the proportion to 40%.
Earlier this year it announced a renewable project with the Amazon Wind Farm (Fowler Ridge) in Indiana could generate 500,000 MWh of wind power annually. In April it then began a pilot project using Tesla’s energy storage batteries to power data centres at times when wind power and solar are not available. In the same month AWS joined the American Council on Renewable Energy and the US Partnership for Renewable Energy Finance to work with government policy makers on developing more renewable energy options.
In June 2015 it said its new AWS Solar Farm in Virginia could generate 170,000 MWh of solar power annually and a month later it added another wind farm in North Carolina that could generate 670,000 MWh a year. In total, AWS claims to have the potential to create 1.6 million MWh of power.
“We continue to pursue projects that help to power AWS data centres and bring us closer to achieving total renewable energy,” said Jerry Hunter, VP of Infrastructure at AWS.