Amazon's first Scottish wind farm has started to generate and provide electricity to the UK grid.
Located on the Kintyre Peninsula, it is one of the largest unsubsidised onshore wind projects in the UK.
Amazon is purchasing 100% of the power generated from its new 50 MegaWatt (MW) wind farm, which is expected to deliver 168,000 MegaWatt hours (MWh) of clean energy annually - enough energy to power 46,000 UK homes.
This is the first of four new, large-scale renewable energy projects in the UK backed by the e-commerce giant. These projects will provide a total capacity of 529 MW of clean energy.
Amazon is the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in Europe with announced investments to supply more than 2.7 GigaWatts (GW) of new electricity production capacity.
The energy generated from these projects will power Amazon and Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres, corporate offices and fulfilment centres across the UK.
Globally, Amazon has now enabled 234 renewable energy projects, including 87 utility-scale wind and solar projects that have the capacity to generate over 10 GW and deliver more than 27 million MWh of energy annually.
Kenneth Matthews, head of energy for EMEA at AWS, said: “Amazon’s commitment to buy the power generated from these projects enables the developer to finance and build them - it sends a clear message that a project of this size can be delivered without public subsidies.”
Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge in 2019 as a commitment to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2040
More than 200 organisations - including Sainsbury’s, PepsiCo, Visa and Telefónica - have now signed The Climate Pledge. Collectively these signatories generate over $1.4trn in global annual revenues and have more than five million employees across 25 industries in 16 countries.
In 2020, the company reached 65% usage of renewable energy across its business, and now claims to be on course to power its operations using just renewable energy by 2025.
John Boumphrey, UK country manager at Amazon, added: “Investing in clean energy and working across all of our operations to become more efficient is just one of the many actions we are taking to reach our commitment as part of The Climate Pledge to be net zero carbon by 2040.”
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