The new solar farms in Virginia’s Buckingham, New Kent, Powhatan, Southampton, and Sussex counties will contribute 180MW of power.
The new facilities join the company’s existing project, the 80MW Amazon Solar Farm US East in Accomack County, Virginia which is already in production.
Amazon worked with developers Virginia Solar and Community Energy Solar on the projects, and
The company said it will further collaborate with an affiliate of Dominion Resources to own and operate the solar farms long term.
The six solar farms will be capable of generating about 580,000MWh of energy annually, which will be consumed by Amazon’s cloud services.
AWS has so far enabled 10 renewable energy projects in the US that will deliver a total of 2.6 million MWh of energy annually onto the electric grid.
The projects power the company's data centers located in the AWS US East (Ohio) and AWS US East (N. Virginia) regions.
AWS Infrastructure vice president Peter DeSantis said: “We continue to ramp our sustainability efforts in areas where availability of renewable energy sources is low or proposed projects are stalled, and where the energy contribution goes onto the same electric grid that powers AWS data centers.
“By enabling 10 utility scale renewable projects in the US to date, we are well positioned to meet our latest goal of 50% renewable energy powering the AWS global infrastructure by the end of 2017.
"That said, we are nowhere near done. We will continue to make progress toward our 100% goal and have many exciting initiatives planned.”
Image: Amazon to install 5 solar plants in Virginia to power its cloud services. Photo: Courtesy of khunaspix/FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
