If it’s good enough for Apple, it’s clearly good enough for Amazon. Bezos & Co. has announced that it’s channelling money into the construction and running of an 80 megawatt solar farm in Virginia.
The plant — enough to power 15,000 US homes each year — should be up and running by 2016. The energy it creates will be used to power at least a proportion of Amazon’s data centres which, like Apple, it wants to run solely on renewable power by some point in the future. So far, it claims to have achieved 25 per cent of that goal. It’s not clear how large Amazon’s investment in this new scheme, which is being built by Community Energy, is, nor for that matter how much of the energy it creates will be available to the retailer. But the answer in each is invariably “lots”.
Amazon is currently also funding a wind farm in Benton County, Indiana, which should produce power from January 2016. [Amazon]
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