More than 229 megawatts of clean power will be added to Amazon Web Services’ data centers by the end of 2021 through three new wind farm deals announced Monday by the cloud computing giant.
The farms in Ireland, Sweden, and Southern California will bolster the clean energy supplies that run AWS’s worldwide network of data centers, which used clean energy for 50 percent of their power needs in 2018. The wind farm in Ireland will generate 91.2 megawatts of power for AWS when it is complete by the end of 2021, and farms in Sweden and outside Bakersfield, Calif. will add 91 megawatts and 47 megawatts, respectively, by the end of next year, AWS said in a press release.
AWS was relatively quiet on the clean-energy front during 2018, which prompted complaints from Greenpeace in February that the cloud computing market share leader wasn’t committed to its eventual goal of running everything on its network with clean energy. Rivals Microsoft and Google signed several major deals for clean energy plants and farms during the year, and The Information reported in December that AWS had backed out of a proposed wind farm deal in Ohio over cost concerns.
The company reiterated Monday its goal of eventually using 100 percent renewable energy to power its data centers in the press release, but it’s not ready to give itself a deadline.
