Amazon.com (AMZN)’s Jeff Bezos Becomes a Texas Energy Farmer

Lincoln Clean Energy will build, own and operate the Texas wind farm.

Each turbine will have rotor diameter about 120m, twice as much wingspan of a Boeing 747.

To satisfy the voracious energy appetite of Amazon Web Services’ cloud data centers, the company is building its largest wind farm to date. Using that as a benchmark, Amazon’s new wind farm will be capable of powering the equivalent of around 90,000 homes each year.

When it opens next year, the west Texas farm will generate 1,000,000 megawatt hours of electricity annually, enough to power almost 90,000 United States homes, Amazon said. The company aims to eventually have its global AWS infrastructure powered by 100 percent renewable energy.

They are scheduled to start delivering energy to the grid by late 2017, and will generate 1,000,000 megawatt hours of wind energy annually.

Amazon may be hoping that its new wind project will prove that it is serious about renewable energy. Amazon will buy about 90% of the electricity generated.

A 253 megawatt wind farm in Scurry county that will generate 1,000,000 megawatt hours of wind energy yearly was announced Thursday by Amazon.

“Direct purchasing by large, long-term thinking customers like Amazon has quickly become a key driver of the transition to renewable power across the U.S”, Flanagan said in a statement.

“Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides the infrastructure for a significant part of the internet, remains among the dirtiest and least transparent companies in the sector, far behind its major competitors, with zero reporting of its energy or environmental footprint to any source or stakeholder”, a 2014 report by Greenpeace said. The company had previously announced renewable projects including solar and wind farms in Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia.

Texas, traditionally known for its oil riches, is the largest wind energy producer in the nation, according to the American Wind Energy Association.