Iron Mountain, which provides storage and information management services including colocation in secure data centers, signed a wind power purchase agreement that will leverage renewable energy sources to power as much as 30 percent of its North American electricity footprint. That capacity will be sufficient to power all of its Texas operations (more than 75 facilities) as well as additional states, providing long-term rate stability and with as much as $1.5 million annually in related cost avoidance.
Under the deal, Iron Mountain will purchase 10 percent of the energy produced at the Amazon Wind Farm Texas, a 253-megawatt (MW) 110+ turbine wind farm in Scurry County, Texas, developed by Lincoln Clean Energy, a developer, owner and operator of clean power projects with a particular focus on wind and solar power in the United States. When completed in 2017, Iron Mountain’s share of the wind farm could produce up to 100,000 megawatt hours (MWh) per year – the equivalent of nearly one-third its power consumption for North America.
“Power consumption is an expensive and resource-consuming part of our global operational footprint , and one of the areas we’ve targeted as an opportunity to transform our business,” said Ty Ondatje, senior vice president of Corporate Responsibility and chief diversity officer, Iron Mountain. “Renewable energy strategies, along with energy efficiency, are at the heart of our efforts to deliver both savings back to the company and look for opportunities to innovate. We’ve discovered that it’s also helping us to open meaningful dialogue and collaboration opportunity with our customers who are seeking to understand and mitigate their own environmental impact. We believe that renewable energy strategies can benefit our business, positioning Iron Mountain and our customers to meet the growing expectations for sustainable business practices.”
Amazon Plans 253 Megawatt Wind Farm in Texas
Amazon will commission a new 253-megawatt (MW) wind farm in Scurry County, Texas, that will generate 1,000,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of wind energy annually – enough energy to power almost 90,000 U.S. homes.
Amazon Wind Farm Texas, which is scheduled to open in late 2017, will include more than 100 turbines and be the company’s largest renewable energy project to date. Amazon previously announced wind and solar farms in Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia that deliver energy to the electrical grids supplying both current and future Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud data centers. The five projects together will generate more than 2.6 million MWh of renewable energy each year.
