SEATTLE _ Amazon.com said Thursday it plans to build a mammoth wind farm in West Texas _ its biggest to date _ as it endeavors to make its cloud business more environmentally friendly.
The farm, located in the heart of Texas' wind country, will yield a million megawatt hours of electricity a year, enough to power 90,000 households. With more than 100 turbines, it represents a more than 60 percent jump in the generation capacity of the renewable energy projects announced by Amazon so far.
The move is part of Amazon's long-term goal to draw all the electricity that powers its hungry data centers from renewable sources. The company said that as of April last year, a quarter of the power its global infrastructure used came from renewables, and it estimated its use of renewables would reach 40 percent by the end of 2016.
The Texas wind farm, scheduled to open in late 2017, is Amazon's fifth renewable project. There are others in Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia.
It's hard to say which electrons produced at Amazon's renewable facilities actually end up in its data centers, especially as renewable sources of energy such as solar and wind are intermittent. But they inject renewable energy into the grid those centers _ and many other people _ feed on, offsetting some of the need for power generated by coal and natural gas.
Texas, traditionally known for its oil riches, is the largest wind energy producer in the nation, according to the American Wind Energy Association. There are more than 10,000 wind turbines _ huge windmill-like structures as large as a passenger jet _ in the windy prairies of the northwestern part of the state. About 10 percent of the state's electricity production came from wind installations in 2015, AWEA said.
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