Amzon has plan to build solar to support date centres

News from cloud provider Amazon Web services that it has plans to build a 80 megawatt solar far in the US to enhance its global connection of date centres for the usage of renewable engery.

The project will be located in Virginia that named Amzon Solar Farm US East. This solar farm is predicted to generate 170,000 megwatt hours of solar power each year. It will make sure for the power application to 15,000 families by October 2016.

It is said AWS will be the largest solar farm in Virginia as it has teamed up with Community Energy to build the facility. They will delivere the energy which generating from the farm into the electrical grids to supply the existing and future data centres.

To achieve 100 percent renewable energy usage for global infrastructure, AWS announced the long-term plans for this target last November. However, the announcement was disbuted due to unmature proposal. There was no clear plan claimed to achieve the goal.

Recently, Greenpeace has talked with AWS on multiple occassions for further discussion. It is not sure whether the Greenpeace refuse running its facilities on renewable energy or use the energy produced by non-renewable resources.

The environmental activist group published a letter from 19 AWS customers this week. It also published the likes of Thoughtworks and The Huffington Post, this letter called on the transparency of the types of energy sources powering its infrastructure provided by the company.

To answer this news, AWS gave the reason that its customers use a small amount of servers and energy which leading to fewer carbon emissions than businesses running their own data centres. However, the lack of transparency on its use of renewable energy concerned by the public was not addressed by AWS.

The company confirmed about 25 percent of AWS’ infrastructure is powered by renewable energy at present. And the company’s goal is to reach 40 percent by the end of next year.

High tech products rely on advanced energy. It is said that Technology giants Apple, Google and Facebook are also working on how to reach their renewable energy goals.

It is acknowledged that 87 percent of Apple’s operations run on renewable energy.

Last year, Facebook run a data centre entirely generated electricity by wind energy. It has addressed it will test solar-powered drones to provide internet access to remote areass. At the same time, Google announced 100 perecent recycled water will be used at its second Singapore data centre.

Recently, Amazon is also working on building a wind farm to power its data centres.

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