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 Could, the corporate mentioned it could make investments $17 billion in infrastructure initiatives, together with knowledge facilities, in Spain.
Amazon’s energy invoice has been hovering recently because it provides knowledge facilities to take care of 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 advanced consists of a complete of three dams, one in all which is an 880-megawatt pumped-storage dam.
Pumped-storage services 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, huge 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 advanced’s present connection, and when there’s extra, it may be used to pump water to the higher reservoir. Such hybrid installations guarantee energy may be fed to the grid persistently from in any other case intermittent renewable assets like wind and photo voltaic.
Amazon can 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 most important 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 may be put in. Final month, Meta mentioned that it had signed two massive offers for solar energy, and Microsoft and Google beforehand introduced that they had been every backing multi-billion greenback renewable investments.
