Dive Brief:
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Online retail giant Amazon has announced it will back the building of the largest solar farm in Virginia.
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Through an arrangement called a power purchase agreement, Community Energy will build the 80-megawatt solar farm by October 2016, and Amazon will buy the energy it produces for the next 15 to 25 years. The solar power will fuel the data centers used for the company’s Amazon Web Services cloud. More than half of those servers are located in northern Virginia.
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Amazon in November pledged to convert all of its operations to renewable energy, and in April reported that approximately 25% of the power it uses comes from renewable sources. The new, 900-acre Amazon Solar Farm U.S. East will generate enough electricity to power 15,000 homes for a year, according to The Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Dive Insight:
A week before Amazon announced its plans for Virginia, 19 of its largest cloud customers — including Netflix, Hootsuite, Tumblr and The Huffington Post — wrote a letter to the company’s senior vice president of web services, asking for more transparency about Amazon’s plans for turning its pledge into reality. Those companies noted that they need the information so they can measure their own “energy footprints of progress toward sustainability goals.”
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said of the plan, “Amazon’s new solar project will create good jobs on the Eastern Shore and generate more clean, renewable energy to fuel the new Virginia economy."
