Amazon builds first wind farm in North Carolina; 208 MW renewable energy facility is expected to produce 670,000 MWH yearly

Amazon Inc., through its subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS), will be building a 208 megawatt wind farm in North Carolina. The wind farm will be built and jointly operated by AWS and Iberdrola Renewables, LLC of Portland, Oregon, and is the first utility-scale wind farm in the state.

According to a press release on Amazon, the wind farm, which will be called Amazon Wind Farm US East, will be located in Perquimans and Pasquotank counties in North Carolina, and will be used to supply electricity to Amazon's data centers. The company expects an output of 670,000 megawatt hours from the facility per year when it becomes operational in December 2016.

Aside from the North Carolina facility, Amazon has several renewable energy projects lined up in different locations across the United States. Last January, it announced the development of a similar wind farm in Benton County, Indiana that is expected to produce 500,000 megawatt-hours of energy annually. Amazon followed that up in June with the announcement of the 80 megawatt Amazon Solar Farm US East in Virginia, which has an annual output of 170,000 megawatt-hours.

When completed, Amazon 's renewable energy projects will be able to deliver a total output of more than 1.3 million megawatt-hours.

Amazon has stated that their successive investments in renewable energy sources is in line with their goal "to achieve 100 percent renewable energy usage for the global AWS infrastructure footprint."

Amazon Web Services Vice President for Infrastructure Jerry Hunter asserts that the company will be relentless in pursuing projects that deliver clean energy to the various energy grids that serve AWS data centers.

"We'll continue working with our power providers to increase their renewable energy quotient, and we'll continue to strongly encourage our partners in government to extend the tax incentives that make it more viable for renewable projects to get off the ground", he said.