Amazon is a key player in internet hosting and product sales, but how does it power its hosting?
Last November, Amazon quietly released a statement dedicating its effort to powering internet servers with 100 percent clean energy. However, that claim came with no details as to how Amazon would pursue that goal. Now, two months after releasing the statement, Amazon is finally fulfilling its claim.
Amazon announced on Tuesday that it was teaming up with Indiana-based Pattern Energy Group LP to build and maintain a wind farm dedicated to powering Amazon's cloud hosting services. The Amazon Web Services Wind Farm (in Fowler Ridge) will be in Benton County, Indiana. Amazon expects the farm to generate over 500,000 megawatt hours of wind power once PEG finishes the farm in 2016.
The power generated at the Amazon Web Services Wind Farm will be transferred to all of its current and future cloud servers.
Jerry Hunter, the vice president of infrastructure at Amazon Web Services, said that the project "will bring a new source of clean energy to the electric grid where we currently operate a large number of datacenters and have ongoing expansion plans to support our growing customer base."
The wind farm isn't Amazon Web Service's first attempt at pursuing clean energy. It first established a carbon-neutral region for its web hosting in the U.S. West (Oregon) and has added Carbon-Neutral regions to both the EU (Frankfurt) and AWS GovClub (US).
