Gamesa to equip 208-MW Amazon wind farm in US

Amazon’s wind energy farm in North Carolina could turn this state into a regional showcase for clean energy. Amazon has contracted with Iberdrola Renewables, which is based in Portland, Oregon.

Amazon Web Services operates a series of electricity-hungry Internet servers that are used to offer cloud computing services that can be accessed from any machine with an Internet connection.

Apple Inc. past year advanced its renewable energy footprint in tech-heavy North Carolina, pioneered by a solar-powered data center in 2013. But the state’s first utility-scale wind energy project won’t make a single watt of electricity for use by North Carolina’s businesses and households.

Output from the wind farm, expected to be operational by December 2016, will power existing data centers of Amazon and those that would come up in the future, the ompany announced on Monday. “Without an answer, AWS customers can not be certain that the wind energy is displacing the gas, coal, and nuclear energy powering those data centers”.

Amazon was singled out in a Greenpeace report past year as lagging behind technology peers such as Apple, Google and Facebook in adopting renewable energy sources to power Web services.

In April 2015, Amazon also announced a pilot to test Tesla energy storage batteries to help store energy from their wind farms.

Amazon Web Service’s VP of Infrastructure, Jerry Hunter, said, “This agreement [to build the new wind farm], and those previously in place, puts AWS on track to surpass our goal of 40 percent renewable energy globally by the end of 2016”.

“We’re far from being done”, he said in a statement. Amazon Wind Farm US East will be Amazon’s largest wind farm.

The proposed facility, if fully built out, could deploy 150 wind turbines that would generate 300 megawatts (MW) of power at full capacity and provide millions of dollars in tax and landowner revenue for decades.

The global e-commerce giant will purchase power from a 208-megawatt wind farm being developed by Iberdrola in North Carolina.

Iberdrola Renewables will be paying more than $500,000 the first year, and more each year after that.