Amazon is building a 150 MW wind farm to provide its green energy DC

Amazon has signed a 13-year contract with Siemens to create a 150 MW wind farm (wind farm) in the United States. Thus, the company continues the implementation of the transition to energy from renewable sources. Earlier, Amazon made a commitment in a few years to switch to 100% provision of "green energy".

The wind farm was called Amazon Wind Farm (Fowler Ridge), and will be located in Benton County, Indiana, USA. The station’s energy will be used to run the local data center that runs Amazon Web Services. By the way, earlier, Amazon saidthat Tesla batteries will be installed in the data center serving Amazon Web Services. In DC Amazon will install a Tesla battery system of 4.8 mW * h. In April, the company joined the American Council on Renewable Energy, and also announced participation in the US PREF (US Partnership for Renewable Energy Finance), to ensure collaboration with local authorities on the use of renewable energy for cloud providers.

Project participants

In addition to Amazon, Pattern Energy Group is participating in this project, it is a US energy company. Another partner is Siemens, which allocates $ 150 million for the construction of the station. The company allocates funds from a special fund Siemens Financial Services (SFS). The company will build 65 wind generators and install 67 transformer systems.

According to partners, the plan is being implemented without interruptions and delays.

Why is green energy?

Amazon, as mentioned above, decided to switch to 100% provision of energy from renewable sources. This statement was made by the leadership of the corporation after joining the initiative of Apple, Google, Facebook and some other companies, which also made a similar commitment.

In the USA and some other countries, telecommunications giants are often accused of the fact that DCs of companies consume a huge amount of “dirty” energy, therefore, companies exert very strong negative pressure on the environment.

Jerry Hunter, Amazon Web Services vice president of infrastructure projects, recently confirmed that every year the company consumes more and more energy. However, Amazon is constantly increasing its share of green energy. It has now been announced that during the construction of new facilities, the company will look for ways to use alternative energy sources to provide electricity to such facilities.

Amazon claims that in its “cloudy” DCs, the company's equipment (optimized in a special way) consumes about 1/8 of the energy that is consumed by similar data-processing equipment of ordinary data centers (blade servers, etc.).

Starting in January 2016, Amazon Wind Farm will start producing 500,000 MWh of energy.

Some technical details

The project will use Siemens SWT-2.3-108 wind generators, each of which provides 2.3 MW. The blade size is 53 meters.


Generator SWT-2.3-108

Siemens Turbine SWT-2.3-108 is part of the G2 platform, generators of this type are located on land. Such a wind generator can work in all weather conditions.

The main parts of the generators will be created in Hutchinson, Kansas, Fort Madison, Iowa and Richland, Mississippi.

More information about the company's wind generators can be found here .