Back in March, we learnt that IKEA had purchased a wind farm big enough to power all its US stores. Well, that was small potatoes. Today the company announced its largest investment in renewables ever: the acquisition of a much larger wind farm in Texas.
The new farm will be built in Cameron County, Texas, which sits at the southernmost tip of Texas, just over the boarder of Texas (it’s actually the southernmost county in the entire US). Cameron is actually the same county where Elon Musk’s SpaceX has purchased land for a potential launch site, and it has several other wind farms already in operation. According to IKEA, it will include 55 turbines built by the wind energy company Acciona, each capable of generating three megawatts when the farm opens next year.
All in all, the new wind farm is more than 1.5 times the size of IKEA’s other farm in the US, and together, they will produce a remarkable amount of power: Enough to power 90,000 homes annually, and more than enough to power its stores. Of course, it won’t be used that way. As we wrote earlier this year, this is part of IKEA’s pledge to go offset its global energy usage by 2020. So while it might be way more than enough power to light up its stores directly, IKEA will sell the power these farms generate to offset its energy footprint overall.
It’s also worth pointing out that IKEA isn’t the only major company that’s buying up wind power: Google bought a huge wind farm in the Netherlands to power a new data center yesterday, too. [IKEA]
Picture: ankiro