Online retail giant Amazon has unveiled plans to build a 253MW wind farm in Scurry County, Texas, US.

The wind farm is expected to generate about 100,000MWh of energy annually, enough to power about 90,000 US households.

Due to open in late 2017, the wind farm will feature over more than 100 turbines.

Each turbine will have rotor diameter about 120m, twice as much wingspan of a Boeing 747.

Amazon claims that the new wind farm will be its largest ever renewable project to date. The company had previously announced renewable projects including solar and wind farms in Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia.

These renewable power plants will supply electricity to the grids and the power will in turn be consumed by Amazon Web Services Cloud data centres for both esisting and future needs.

With the new project, Amazon will have a portfolio of five renewable power plants and cumulatively they produce more than 2.6 million MWh of renewable energy annually. This amount of electricity will be enough to power about 240,000 US households.

Amazon sustainability director Kara Hurst said: “We’re excited to work with the community in Scurry County and Lincoln Clean Energy to generate 1,000,000 MWh of renewable energy each year from West Texas.

“Amazon Wind Farm Texas is our largest renewable energy project to date and the newest milestone in our long-term sustainability efforts across the company.”

Lincoln Clean Energy will construct, own and operate the Amazon Wind Farm Texas. 90% of the power generated from the wind farm will be purchased by Amazon.

Lincoln Clean Energy founder and CEO Declan Flanagan said: “We applaud Amazon’s leadership in directly purchasing renewable power.

“Direct purchasing by large, long-term thinking customers like Amazon has quickly become a key driver of the transition to renewable power across the U.S.”


Image: Amazon to develop a 253MW wind farm in Texas. Photo: Courtesy of alex_ugalek/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net.