By FGP on 18th November 2019
Amazon will take power from a wind farm in Scotland and more solar in the US, in the latest expansion of its renewable energy commitments.
The web retail giant said a 50MW Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) for a wind project in the Kintyre Peninsula in Scotland will be “the largest corporate wind power deal in the UK” delivering 168GWh annually when it starts producing power in 2021. The Amazon Wind Farm will be built by Scottish Power.
This is a big prize for UK onshore wind and is locked out of the British government’s contract-for-difference renewables support mechanism. Amazon will also “take power” from 215MW of solar at plants in North Carolina and Virginia in the US, where the online group is already a major procurer of renewable energy.
All three projects will deliver power to help green the consumption of data centres run by its Amazon Web Services unit. Combined with a reported 70 renewable energy projects around the globe – including 54 solar rooftops – Amazon already has 1.6GW of wind and solar as part of its aim to become 100%-renewable by 2030.
This type of corporate funding is likely to feature more prominently in the coming years. A senior Google executive told a recent conference on corporate renewable energy that large tech companies were now in a type of “arms race” to buy wind and solar power. A side swipe from an official from the European chemicals industry warned that greening IT data centres was no substitute for cleaning up the output from giant chemical, paper and steel plants.
Tesco are also combining with Scottish Power to build a 30 MW 15 turbine windfarm in Caithness. This is part of Tesco’s pledge to use 100 percent renewable energy by 2030.