Renewables notched one other win as Amazon signed contracts to purchase 476 megawatts of wind and photo voltaic on the Iberian Peninsula.
The energy buy agreements with multinational utility Iberdrola ought to assist Amazon feed new information facilities it has deliberate within the area. Last May, the corporate mentioned it might make investments $17 billion in infrastructure tasks, together with information facilities, in Spain.
Amazon’s energy invoice has been hovering recently because it provides information facilities to cope with rising demand for AI and cloud providers.
One of the tasks 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, certainly one of which is an 880-megawatt pumped-storage dam.
Pumped-storage amenities have two reservoirs, one greater 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 complicated’s current connection, and when there’s extra, it may be used to pump water to the higher reservoir. Such hybrid installations guarantee energy will be fed to the grid persistently from in any other case intermittent renewable sources like wind and photo voltaic.
Amazon can also be shopping for a portion of the ability from extra typical wind and photo voltaic crops in northwestern Spain. Last yr, the corporate was the most important purchaser of renewable energy.
Tech corporations have been shopping for energy from renewable tasks at a reasonably constant tempo, pushed partially by how shortly and inexpensively wind, photo voltaic, and batteries will be put in. Last month, Meta mentioned that it had signed two giant offers for solar energy, and Microsoft and Google beforehand introduced that they have been every backing multi-billion greenback renewable investments.
