Community Energy Inc. is building an 80 MW solar farm in Accomack County, Va., for Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company.
The Amazon Solar Farm U.S. East is scheduled to be operational in October 2016 and is expected to generate approximately 170 GWh of electricity per year. All energy generated by the facility will be delivered to the electrical grids that supply both current and future AWS cloud data centers. AWS has signed a long-term power purchase agreement (PPA) for the electricity from the project.
In November 2014, AWS announced a goal to generate 100% of the electricity used by its global infrastructure from renewable sources. As of April, AWS says that approximately 25% of the power its operations consume comes from renewable energy sources. By the end of 2016, the company hopes to push this to 40%.