To satisfy the voracious energy appetite of Amazon Web Services’ cloud data centers and other parts of Amazon’s business, the company is building its largest wind farm to date.
The facility will house more than 100 turbines, “each with a diameter twice as long as the wingspan of a Boeing 747,” Amazon said in a blog post Thursday.
The farm, planned for western Texas’ Scurry County, is expected to start delivering energy by the end of 2017. It will generate 1,000,000 megawatt hours of wind energy annually “That’s enough energy to power almost 90,000 American homes for a year,” Amazon says.
Although today’s announcement is not directly tied to AWS, two years ago, Amazon announced long-term plans to run all of its data centers on renewable energy. Making good on that promise, the company has opened wind farms in Indiana, Ohio, and North Carolina. Amazon also has a solar farm in Virginia.
Other tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, and Apple have made similar commitments to reduce the carbon footprint left by their massive data operations.
After opening the North Carolina wind farm last summer, AWS vice president of infrastructure Jerry Hunter said Amazon’s cloud business was, “on track to surpass our goal of 40 percent renewable energy globally by the end of 2016.” He added, “We’re far from being done. We’ll continue pursuing projects that deliver clean energy to the various energy grids that serve AWS data centers.”
