Amazon has launched a wind farm in Texas which it says is its largest renewable energy project to date.
Amazon Wind Farm Texas is a 253-megawatt wind farm, which according to Amazon will generate 1,000,000 megawatt hours of wind energy annually, enough to power 90,000 typical US homes.
The project, launched with Lincoln Clean Energy, will include over 100 turbines.
It will open and begin delivering energy to the grid in late 2017.
Amazon has previously announced four other wind and solar farms in Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia.
The combined projects will be used to provide energy to the electrical grids supplying current and future Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud data centres.
Amazon Web Services has a long-term commitment to use 100 percent renewable energy for its entire global infrastructure. It made the commitment in November 2014.
The company has not specified a target for when this will be achieved. As of April 2015, approximately 25 percent of power consumed by Amazon’s global infrastructure came from renewable energy sources. By the end of 2016, Amazon intends to reach 40 percent.
On January 1, 2016, its first day of full operation, Amazon Wind Farm Fowler Ridge was launched.
According to David Pomerantz, a Senior Climate and Energy Campaigner for Greenpeace USA, writing on the Greenpeace blog, “Amazon data centres consume massive amounts of electricity, and they’re proliferating incredibly quickly.”
In his blog, Pomerantz lauded the goal but said that Amazon needed to address issues including transparency over how it defined renewable energy.
Amazon’s fellow tech companies Apple, Facebook and Google have also outlined plans to achieve their goals of procuring 100 percent renewable energy.
“We’re excited to work with the community in Scurry County and a great team to generate more clean energy and bring additional jobs and investment to the area,” said Amazon in a statement.
