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 information facilities it has deliberate within the area. Final Could, the corporate mentioned it could 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 take care of rising demand for AI and cloud providers.
One of many tasks 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 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 by the hydro advanced’s current connection, and when there’s extra, it may be used to pump water to the higher reservoir. Such hybrid installations guarantee energy might be fed to the grid constantly 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. Final 12 months, 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 partly by how rapidly and inexpensively wind, photo voltaic, and batteries might be put in. Final month, Meta mentioned that it had signed two giant deals for solar power, and Microsoft and Google beforehand introduced that they had been every backing multi-billion greenback renewable investments.
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