Tech giant confirms it is to source clean power from new wind farms in Ireland, Sweden, and California
Amazon has today announced it is to support three major new wind energy projects capable of delivering more than 670,000 megawatt-hours per year – an output equivalent to the energy demand of Nashville, Tennessee.
The tech giant confirmed it has committed to buy all the power from a 91.2MW wind farm in Donegal, Ireland, which is expected to start generating by the end of 2021. The project will be developed by Irish electricity producer Invis Energy and is expected to become the country’s first unsubsidized major wind energy project. Amazon will also source 91MW of capacity from a new wind farm in Backhammer, Sweden, which is slated to be operational in 2020. And a further 47MW will come from a new wind farm project in California’s Tehachapi Mountains, site of several of the US’s largest wind farms.
“Each of these projects brings us closer to our long-term commitment to use 100 per cent renewable energy to power our global AWS infrastructure,” said Peter DeSantis, Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, Amazon Web Services. Last year, the firm exceeded 50 per cent renewable energy for its global infrastructure for the first time. In total, Amazon has enabled 53 wind and solar projects worldwide, which produce more than 1,016 MW and are expected to deliver over 3,075,636 million MWh of energy annually.
However, the company has also faced criticism from environmental campaigners over its continued reliance on fossil fuel power stations and its failure to provide more details on its decarbonisation plans.
The latest announcement comes after a Greenpeace report published in February accused Amazon of having “abandoned its commitment to renewable energy”.
“Unlike other IT leaders such as Apple, Google and Facebook that adopted 100 per cent renewable energy commitments, Amazon has remained notoriously opaque when it comes to publicly reporting information about its current energy use and how fast it is growing,” the report said.
Forrás:https://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/3073849/amazon-set-to-deliver-three-new-wind-energy-projects