Digital giant Amazon has planned to expand its renewable energy sourcing capacity in Ireland by investing in a new 115MW wind farm project in Ardderroo, Galway.
The Galway wind facility is slated to become operational in 2022. Once operational, energy from the facility will power Amazon Web Services data centres in the country.
This project will become part of Amazon’s portfolio in the country, located in Esk in County Cork and Meenbog in County Donegal. The Esk wind facility was the first Amazon wind farm outside the US.
The wind project in County Cork will come online next month, while the County Donegal facility will begin operating in early 2022.
Together, the three projects will add 229MW of wind generation to the Irish grid. This will power 185,000 homes annually, while offsetting 366,000t of carbon emissions.
The three projects will also make Amazon one of the largest single corporate buyers of renewable energy in the country.
In a statement, the company emphasised its pledge to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. As part of this commitment, it has set goals such as being 100% powered by renewable energy sources by 2025.
An Amazon spokesperson said: “We’re not only investing in renewable energy to build a sustainable business in Ireland – we’re also innovating to preserve water. Water is a precious resource, that we’re committed to conserving and reusing where possible.
“To reduce both the energy and water we use in our Irish data centers, we use direct evaporative cooling systems, which predominately utilises outside air to cool our servers. This means that for more than 95% of the year we use no water to cool our data centers in Ireland.”
The company has also started using heat from its data centres to provide district heating schemes.
In May this year, Amazon revealed plans for five new utility-scale solar power projects in Australia, China and the US.