Amazon wind farm to power data centres

Cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced it will build a large-scale wind farm to power its data centres, as part of its promise to shift to fully renewable energy sources.

Called Amazon Web Services Wind Farm (Fowler Ridge), the facility is projected to start generating half a million megawatt hours in January next year. Ultimately, the AWS wind farm is scheduled to generate 150 megawatts of capacity.

The wind farm is being built with AWS partners Pattern Energy Group in the midwestern state of Indiana, United States.

Last year, environmental lobby group Greenpeace slammed Amazon for refusing to provide details of how it planned to meet its pledge of reaching 100 per cent renewable energy usage.

Amazon has since claimed three of its AWS regions - US West in Oregon, the GovCloud and the EU instance in Frankfurt - are carbon neutral.

The company insists that cloud computing is inherently more environmentally friendly than traditional computing thanks to improved server capacity usage and less energy consumption to power the infrastructure.

However, AWS has yet to publish audited energy consumption figures that support its position.

In comparison, several other large IT companies like Apple publish detailed sustainability reports, with metrics on energy and materials used.