Amazon Web Services will set up an 80 megawatt (MW) solar farm in Accomack County, Virginia, to generate nearly 170,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of solar power annually as early as October 2016.
Amazon Solar Farm US East being established in association with with Community Energy will be the largest solar farm in the state of Virginia, with all energy generated delivered into the electrical grids that supply both current and future AWS Cloud datacenters.
Earlier, AWS announced that nearly 25 percent of the power consumed by its infrastructure comes from renewable energy sources with an interim goal of increasing that percentage to at least 40 percent by the end of 2016. Its long-term commitment is to achieve 100 percent renewable energy usage for the AWS infrastructure.
Jerry Hunter, vice president of Infrastructure at Amazon Web Services, said: “Amazon Solar Farm US East – the second PPA that will serve both existing and planned AWS datacenters in the central and eastern US – has the added benefit of working to increase the availability of renewable energy in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”
