Amazon wants to power its datacenters using wind farms

Going green has almost become a competition between technology companies, and Amazon is no exception. The company’s Amazon Web Services division has announced plans to supply clean energy to its cloud datacenters using wind power from a new 150MW farm that it will be building in partnership with the Pattern Energy Group. This almost certainly in response to the criticism that the company got from Greenpeace in its “green Internet” report last year. 

Amazon Web Services will soon use wind power to generate electricity for its cloud datacenters. The Seattle giant today announced that it is partnering with Pattern Energy Group LP to build the Amazon Web Services Wind Farm (Fowler Ridge) in Benton County, Ind. The new 150MW farm, which will provide energy to AWS datacenters starting in January 2016, will generate 500,000 megawatt hours of power annually, which Amazon says is enough to provide 46,000 homes with electricity for an entire year. In November, Amazon made a long-term commitment to use renewable energy to power all of the company’s datacenters. That announcement came after Amazon was criticized by Greenpeace in the organization’s “green Internet” report because of its data centers’ current power sources. As of today, Amazon has carbon-neutral data centers in three regions: US West (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt) and AWS GovCloud.