Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has joined the green movement adopted by tech companies that have turned to solar, sun, wind and geothermal energy to power their server farms and offices. The e-commerce firm’s management said it would turn to wind farms to power its Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities. Whether the plan will be a source of a great deal of Amazon’s energy needs was not clear.
Amazon’s Web Services operation is critical to the future of the company. It is a major move toward domination of cloud services, which is a battleground across a number of tech firms. Among corporations challenging Amazon are Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), which has had some success, and International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM), which has failed to far. The fact that AWS is such an important part of Amazon’s future makes adoption of wind power all the more visible.
Specifically, the e-commerce company announced:
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced that it has teamed with Pattern Energy Group LP (Pattern Development) to support the construction and operation of a 150 megawatt (MW) wind farm in Benton County, Indiana, called the Amazon Web Services Wind Farm (Fowler Ridge). This new wind farm is expected to start generating approximately 500,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of wind power annually as early as January 2016 — or the equivalent of that used by approximately 46,000 US homes in a year. The energy generated by Amazon Web Services Wind Farm (Fowler Ridge) will be used to help power both current and future AWS Cloud datacenters.
Left out of the comments was any analysis of what portion of AWS’s energy needs will come from the wind farm. For all outsiders know, it could be a tiny portion, or the great majority.
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Until now, tech companies have made only modest commitments to alternative energy. Even Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) engineers, major proponents, have expressed doubts about how effective their efforts will be in the future.
It is unclear whether alternative energy is a real means for Amazon to source most of its energy, or whether the effort is just a toy.
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