Renewables notched another win as Amazon signed contracts to buy 476 megawatts of wind and solar on the Iberian Peninsula.
The power purchase agreements with multinational utility Iberdrola should help Amazon feed new data centers it has planned in the region. Last May, the company said it would invest $17 billion in infrastructure projects, including data centers, in Spain.
Amazon’s power bill has been soaring lately as it adds data centers to deal with rising demand for AI and cloud services.
One of the projects that Amazon is buying into — the Tâmega wind farm — is being built alongside a massive hydroelectric dam system in Portugal. The complex consists of a total of three dams, one of which is an 880-megawatt pumped-storage dam.
Pumped-storage facilities have two reservoirs, one higher in elevation, one lower. When power is needed, water is released from the upper reservoir to spin turbines. When there’s excess power, massive pumps shift water from the lower reservoir to the upper one. Pumped storage is, in effect, a massive battery.
The 274-megawatts of wind turbines being installed at Tâmega will feed power to the grid through the hydro complex’s existing connection, and when there’s excess, it can be used to pump water to the upper reservoir. Such hybrid installations ensure power can be fed to the grid consistently from otherwise intermittent renewable resources like wind and solar.
Amazon is also buying a portion of the power from more typical wind and solar plants in northwestern Spain. Last year, the company was the largest buyer of renewable power.
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Tech companies have been buying power from renewable projects at a fairly consistent pace, driven in part by how quickly and inexpensively wind, solar, and batteries can be installed. Last month, Meta said that it had signed two large deals for solar power, and Microsoft and Google previously announced that they were each backing multibillion-dollar renewable investments.
