Avangrid expands power purchase agreement with Amazon to include 98.4 MW wind project
Amazon and Avangrid, Inc. agreed to expand their working relationship with a new power purchase agreement recently, which will give the commercial giant access to 98.4 MW of renewable energy sourced from the Amazon Wind Farm Oregon – Leaning Juniper IIA.
“Amazon is excited to announce our first utility-scale renewable energy project in Oregon,” Abhishek Sharma, head of energy strategy for Amazon Web Services (AWS), said. “The project adds to the 2 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity Amazon has already enabled across the western U.S. grid. This has contributed to Amazon being the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for four years running, and will help Amazon remain on a path to utilizing 100% renewable energy for the electricity powering its operations by 2025.”
The project is a repowering effort that will extend the life of the existing wind farm in Gilliam County, Oregon, while deploying efficiency updates. When finished, it will include 40 turbines. Avangrid will also recycle all turbine blades to be decommissioned from the project, which could result in more than 1,000 tons of mass diverted from landfills.
“We are proud to have signed this agreement with Amazon, a company that shares our commitment to accelerating the global transition to renewable energy,” Pedro Azagra, Avangrid CEO, said. “With projects like this, we are not only supporting Amazon’s climate goals, but creating jobs and contributing to local communities.”
Azagra added that repowering projects like this allow Avangrid to take advantage of improving technologies to generate power ever more efficiently. He pointed to the company’s large existing onshore fleet and touted this as a proof of concept for repowerings to follow over the next decade.
