Amazon to Build 670,000-Megawatt Wind Farm

Amazon Web Services has announced that it will contract the construction of a 208-megawatt wind farm in North Carolina. Beginning in December of 2016 the new Amazon Wind Farm US East is supposed to start generating 670,000-megawatt hours of wind energy a year. Enough energy to power 61,000 U.S. homes for a year. According to Amazon Web Services this will supply all of its current data centers in the “US East” region as well as all of the data centers it will eventually build there.

This will be the first utility scale wind farm in North Carolina. It will be connected to an electrical grid that supplies Amazon Cloud data centers in the region. That grid will also receive power from an 80-megawatt solar farm in Accomack County, Virginia, which Amazon announced in June and hopes to have online by October 2016. Amazon Solar Farm US East will produce 170-megawatt hours of electricity each year.

This is all a part of Amazon’s goal to make a wholesale switch to renewable energy. Last November, the company announced that it intends to eventually use renewable energy to power 100% of its global infrastructure. The immediate goal is 40% by the end of 2016.

According to BusinessWire, Amazon was already drawing 25 percent of its energy from renewable sources as of April 2015. By January 2016, it will be getting another 500,000-megawatt hours of wind power a year from a new wind farm in Indiana called Amazon Wind Farm Fowler Ridge, which will mostly supply power to data centers in central Ohio.

In April Amazon also announced a small 4.8-megawatt hour pilot of Tesla’s energy storage batteries, which are designed to be sued with intermittent renewable power sources like wind and solar.