Amazon Web Services to buy power from 208MW wind farm in North Carolina

Amazon Web Services has joined forces with Spanish renewable energy company Iberdrola Renewables to set up a 208MW wind farm in Perquimans and Pasquotank counties, North Carolina.

Named Amazon Wind Farm US East, the wind farm will generate around 670,000MWh of power after completion in December 2016.

The technology company said that the electricity generated from the farm would be delivered into the electrical grid that will supply power to future and present AWS Cloud data centers in Virginia and Ohio.

Just like Google, Amazon has also pledged to achieve 100% renewable energy usage for the global AWS infrastructure footprint.

The company said that around 25% of the power consumed by its global infrastructure is generated from renewable source at present, and it will be increased to 40% by the end of 2016.

In January this year, the company announced a renewable project with the Amazon Wind Farm Benton County, Indiana, which is likely to generate 500,000MWh of wind power annually, and it also teamed up with Tesla to announce a pilot project of Tesla’s energy storage batteries.

Amazon Web Services infrastructure vice president Jerry Hunter said: "This agreement, and those previously in place, puts AWS on track to surpass our goal of 40% renewable energy globally by the end of 2016.

"We’re far from being done. We’ll continue pursuing projects that deliver clean energy to the various energy grids that serve AWS data centers, 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."