Amazon has announced it intends to build a 27 turbine wind farm in Galway to help power its data centres in Ireland.
The 115 Megawatt wind farm wind will be located in Ardderroo, Connemara, the Irish Times reports this morning, and is expected to become operational in 2022.
The project will add 229MW of wind energy to the Irish grid each year, to support Amazon Web Services data centres in the country.
It is the latest in a string of renewable energy projects undertaken by the company in Ireland, including a wind farm in Ersk, Co. Cork, which is soon to come online, and another in Meenborg, Co. Donegal, which has yet to be built.
The massive electricity usage of large scale data centres, and the strain they could put on the existing grid, have been one of the largest concerns people have raised over the advancement of such projects, in Ireland and elsewhere.
This latest project will generate the equivalent of 185,000 homes’ energy usage, and cut carbon emissions by 366,000 tonnes each year.
