Amazon has taken another decisive step toward using clean energy to power operations, particularly of its data centers supporting its cloud computing service.
The global e-commerce giant will purchase power from a 208-megawatt wind farm being developed by Iberdrola in North Carolina.
Output from the wind farm, expected to be operational by December 2016, will power existing data centers of Amazon and those that would come up in the future, the company announced on Monday.
Recently some of its largest cloud customers had publicly asked Amazon to invest in clean energy.
The company, too, has been showing an inclination for clean energy, which is indicated by the slight improvement in its grading in the Click Clean initiative of Greenpeace.
Last month, Amazon had announced plans to buy solar power generated by a project in Virginia to power its cloud data centers. Besides, the company also plans to buy wind power from a project in Indiana.
Amazon is under pressure to shift to clean energy because it supports the largest number of online operations globally. The company’s shift to green energy would have a huge impact as it would then sustainably power the operations of scores of online companies including large clients such as Netflix, Pinterest, Tumblr and Upworthy.
Amazon’s first commitment to clean energy was to power its entire cloud infrastructure using such sources by November 2014. Currently 25 percentage of the electricity used by Amazon’s data center infrastructure comes from clean energy sources.
The company now plans to increase share of clean energy in powering its operations to 40 percent by the end of 2016.
Ajith Kumar S
editor@greentechlead.com