The project called, Amazon Wind Farm US East, will be built in Perquimans and Pasquotank counties. It is expected to start operation in December 2016.
Upon completion, the wind farm is estimated to generate about 670,000 MWh of energy per year, enough to power over 61,000 homes.
AWS will use the energy generated from the wind farm to power its cloud data centers.
In November last year, AWS had set a goal of generating all of its power from renewable energy sources.
Currently, about 25% of the power used by the company’s global data center infrastructure comes from clean energy. AWS plans to increase it to around 40% by the end of 2016.
AWS vice president of infrastructure Jerry Hunter said: "We’ll continue pursuing projects that deliver clean energy to the various energy grids that serve AWS data centers, we’ll continue working with our power providers to increase their renewable energy quotient, and we’ll continue to strongly encourage our partners in government to extend the tax incentives that make it more viable for renewable projects to get off the ground."
Earlier this year, AWS agreed to buy power from a 150MW wind farm in Indiana from Pattern Energy Group.
AWS is also building a 80MW solar farm in Accomack County, Virginia, which is expected to start operations in October 2016.
Once completed, all the renewable energy projects of Amazon will have the capacity to generate over 1.3 million megawatt hours of electricity, enough to power about 122,000 households.
Amazon is the latest tech major to switch to renewable to meet the power requirement after Apple, Google and Facebook.
In April this year, the company had joined hands with Tesla for pilot scale energy storage batteries to tap wind power for data center power equipment.
Image: The Amazon Wind Farm US East will be built in Perquimans and Pasquotank counties, North Carolina. Photo: courtesy of dan/FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
