Amazon Web Services teams with another company to build a solar farm in Accomack County

Published June 10, 2015 by Paula C. Squires

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, said Wednesday that it has teamed with Community Energy Inc., a solar developer based in Radnor, Pa.,  to support the construction and operation of an 80-megawatt (MW) solar farm in Accomack County.

The farm, which would be called Amazon Solar Farm U.S. East, is expected to start generating about 170,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of solar power annually as early as October 2016. That’s the equivalent of power used by approximately 15,000 U.S. homes in a year.

According to AWS, the project would be the largest solar farm in Virginia. Its energy would be delivered into electrical grids that supply both current and future AWS Cloud datacenters.

In November, AWS announced plans to achieve 100 percent renewable energy usage for its global infrastructure footprint. As of April, AWS said that about 25 percent of the power consumed by its infrastructure comes from renewable sources. The company’s interim goal is to increase that percentage to at least 40 percent by the end of next year.

The power purchase agreement (PPA) for Amazon Solar Farm U.S. East follows a similar PPA for Amazon Wind Farm (Fowler Ridge) in Benton County, Ind., that was announced in January. That farm is expected to generate about 500,000 MWh of wind power annually.

Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services offers a technology infrastructure platform in the cloud comprised of a set of compute, storage, database, analytics, application, and deployment services from datacenter locations in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, Ireland, Japan and Singapore.   According to the company, more than a million customers use AWS services.