Amazon.com said Monday it’s commissioned a new 189-megawatt (MW) wind farm in Hardin County, Ohio, to help offset the power needs of its cloud computing business, Kallanish Energy reports.
Amazon Web Services, the tech giant’s cloud computing division, has vowed to fill at least half of the energy needs of its big data centers using renewable energy by 2017, up from 40% in 2016, a goal Amazon says it’s on track to meet or exceed.
Amazon’s new wind farm, located 70 miles northwest of Columbus, will be the company’s second such facility in the state. A wind farm located in Paulding County in western Ohio, is projected to start supplying power to the electric grid next May.
The Hardin County wind farm will generate 530,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of wind energy annually, Amazon said.
“We remain committed to achieving our long-term goal of powering the AWS Cloud with 100% renewable energy,” said Peter DeSantis, vice president, Infrastructure, AWS.
“We applaud Amazon’s goal to power the global infrastructure for the industry-leading AWS Cloud with renewable energy and are pleased to collaborate in this effort,” said Jim Spencer, CEO of EverPower, the company that will build, own and operate the new Amazon wind farm.
Once completed, the Hardin County facility will be the fifth renewable energy project undertaken by AWS. Others, besides the two Ohio facilities, include wind farms in Indiana and North Carolina and a solar farm in Virginia.
When this newest wind farm is completed, AWS’s five renewable energy projects will generate a total of 2.2 million MWh of energy annually — enough to power almost 200,000 homes.
