Renewables notched one other win as Amazon signed contracts to purchase 476 megawatts of wind and photo voltaic on the Iberian Peninsula.
The ability buy agreements with multinational utility Iberdrola ought to assist Amazon feed new knowledge facilities it has deliberate within the area. Final Might, the corporate stated it could make investments $17 billion in infrastructure initiatives, together with knowledge facilities, in Spain.
Amazon’s energy invoice has been hovering currently because it provides knowledge facilities to cope with rising demand for AI and cloud providers.
One of many initiatives that Amazon is shopping for into — the Tâmega wind farm — is being constructed alongside a large hydroelectric dam system in Portugal. The complicated consists of a complete of three dams, one in all which is an 880-megawatt pumped-storage dam.
Pumped-storage amenities have two reservoirs, one larger in elevation, one decrease. When energy is required, water is launched from the higher reservoir to spin generators. When there’s extra energy, large pumps shift water from the decrease reservoir to the higher one. Pumped storage is, in impact, a large battery.
The 274-megawatts of wind generators being put in at Tâmega will feed energy to the grid via the hydro complicated’s present connection, and when there’s extra, it may be used to pump water to the higher reservoir. Such hybrid installations guarantee energy could be fed to the grid constantly from in any other case intermittent renewable assets like wind and photo voltaic.
Amazon can also be shopping for a portion of the facility from extra typical wind and photo voltaic vegetation in northwestern Spain. Final 12 months, the corporate was the biggest purchaser of renewable energy.
Tech firms have been shopping for energy from renewable initiatives at a reasonably constant tempo, pushed partly by how shortly and inexpensively wind, photo voltaic, and batteries could be put in. Final month, Meta stated that it had signed two giant offers for solar energy, and Microsoft and Google beforehand introduced that they had been every backing multi-billion greenback renewable investments.
