Amazon Announces New Wind Farm to Power Its Massive Cloud Computing Service
The world's biggest websites will live on servers operated by wind and sun energy.
The websites for Airbnb, Major League Baseball, Yelp, Adobe, Pinterest, Expedia, Netflix, NASA, and many others live on servers powered by Amazon, and many of those websites will soon be powered by wind.
On Thursday, Amazon announced plans for its third wind farm to be built in Ohio, [the latest] (http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainable-energy/) from the Seattle-based company. The farms will eventually provide electricity for its growing Amazon Web Services business.
Already announced: Amazon wind farms in Indiana and North Carolina, which will start turning in January and December 2016 respectively — and a solar plant in Virginia that will begin operating in October 2016.
Dubbed “Amazon Wind Farm US Central,” the Ohio-based wind farm will start operating in May 2017. In total, “Amazon’s renewable projects will be responsible for delivering more than 1.6 million megawatt hours of additional renewable energy into electric grids across the central and eastern U.S., or roughly the equivalent amount of energy required to power 150,000 US homes,” according to a statement released by the company.
The third planned wind farm by Amazon “is expected to start generating approximately 320,000 megawatt hours of wind energy a year” — “or enough to power more than 29,000 U.S. homes.”
In July, Amazon broke ground on that North Carolina wind farm, the largest of the three:
An Amazon executive reiterated on Thursday that the company’s still on its path to powering much of its infrastructure with sustainable, renewable energy:
“Our previously announced renewable energy projects put AWS on track to surpass our goal of 40 percent renewable energy globally by the end of 2016,” said Jerry Hunter, the Vice President of Infrastructure at Amazon Web Services.
