Amazon on lookout for more Irish wind farms following third acquisition

Internet giant Amazon is on the lookout for more Irish windfarms after announcing its third such acquisition aimed at supplying its data centres in Ireland with renewable energy.

Rather than buying the actual windfarm infrastructure, Amazon is buying the energy produced by them and is the sole user. 

It aims to power its Irish-based Amazon Web Services – or AWS – data centres 100% by renewable energy means.

Amazon has bought the energy output of the 115-megawatt Ardderroo windfarm in Galway, which will be operational by 2022. Last year Amazon made a similar acquisition in Esk, Co Cork; and at Meenbog in Co Donegal. 

The Cork windfarm is due to be operational next month, with the Donegal project operational in early 2022. As with those deals, no financial details of the Galway acquisition have been disclosed.

Amazon said more such acquisitions are likely in order to reach its 100% renewables goal. Once the current projects are operational, Amazon will be the largest single corporate buyer of renewable energy in Ireland.

Through clean energy and water conservation projects, Amazon said it is committed to operating environmentally-friendly and sustainable data centres in Ireland.

“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,” the company said.

“To reduce both the energy and water we use in our Irish data centres, 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 centres in Ireland. For the few hot days Ireland does see, we use a minimal amount of water to cool the air that removes heat from our servers,” it said.