Renewables notched one other win as Amazon signed contracts to purchase 476 megawatts of wind and photo voltaic on the Iberian Peninsula.
The facility buy agreements with multinational utility Iberdrola ought to assist Amazon feed new information facilities it has deliberate within the area. Final Might, the corporate stated it could make investments $17 billion in infrastructure tasks, together with information facilities, in Spain.
Amazon’s energy invoice has been hovering these days because it provides information facilities to cope with 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 an enormous hydroelectric dam system in Portugal. The advanced 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 increased 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, an enormous 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 may be fed to the grid constantly from in any other case intermittent renewable sources like wind and photo voltaic.
Amazon can 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 biggest 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 may 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.