Amazon to Use Wind Power for Data Centers

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 21, 6:35AM EST

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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.

ALSO READ: J.P. Morgan’s Top Alternative Energy and Smart Grid Stocks for 2015

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.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.