Some neat news from my colleague Jeffrey Burt over at eWEEK today...

Amazon is working with Community Energy to build an 80-megawatt solar farm in Virginia to help power its Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in Virginia. Jeffrey writes:

The solar farm—which will be built in Accomack County, Va., and will power up as early as October 2016—will generate about 170,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of solar power every year, which is about the amount of energy used to power 15,000 homes in the United States, according to Amazon Web Services (AWS) officials.The energy generated by Amazon Solar Farm US East will be sent into electrical grids that supply current and future AWS cloud data centers, they said.

The energy generated by Amazon Solar Farm US East will be sent into electrical grids that supply current and future AWS cloud data centers, they said.

The new solar farm should help the company blunt criticisms that the company is running its massive cloud operations on mostly non-renewable sources, 77 percent of the electricity used by AWS in fact, according to Green America, a nonprofit group that champions ethical consumerism. But such figures don’t tell the complete story, argues Amazon, since cloud customers consume much less power compared to on-premises deployments of servers, storage and all the other systems that make data centers tick.

Read more on the solar farm and Amazon’s renewables-powered cloud efforts here.

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