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Amazon to Power its Ohio Operations with Wind Farm

Amazon is building wind farms in Ohio, North Carolina, and Indiana and a solar farm in Virginia (photo Amazon)

Online retailer Amazon wants to power its operations on clean energy so it’s building a wind farm in western Ohio. 

Ideastream’s Mark Urycki reports the project comes despite the Ohio legislature’s lack of interest in supporting renewable energy sources.

 

Amazon Web Services has a long-term goal of 100% renewable energy to power its operations.  Last year, Amazon announced it’s building three data centers and two distribution centers in the Columbus area.  And to help offset the electricity used by those centers, the company is building 48 wind turbines in Paulding County on the Indiana border.  The county’s economic development director Jerry Zielke.

“They wanted to buy renewable power here in Ohio and of course we have the most wind turbines out here – Van Wert and Paulding Counties - so it definitely was an attraction for Amazon to come to Ohio.”   

Paulding already has 92 windmills now, many built by the Portuguese company EDP Renewables.  That company had planned the new windmill farm before Amazon signed on.  Zielke estimates it will cost about $175m to $200m to build the Amazon wind farm.  The state assesses a fee on each windmill which he says has been a boon to local schools

“It’s definitely improved -  one school district alone gets about $750,000 a year they didn’t have before so.  And it’s a low tax base rural school so it was really beneficial to them.”  

Zielke says the company is also hiring several hundred local workers for the construction.

“There’s incentives for them to use Ohio-sourced labor and construction companies and they’ve pretty much adhered to that. There may be some outside contractors but they try to do mostly local or regional people involved with the construction of these projects   It’s a great benefit to northwest Ohio."

The power will be uploaded to the grid on several main transmission lines that run through the county. 

In 2008 Governor Ted Strickland signed clean energy standards that required some renewable energy in Ohio. It called for 12.5 percent of electricity sold by Ohio’s electric distribution utilities come from renewable soyurces by 2027.  But in 2014 Governor John Kasich signed a bill that froze those standards. 

It also made it more difficult to build any new windmills by more than doubling the amount of setback space needed. A few months ago legislators proposed making that freeze indefinite.   

But in the latest budget bill Ohio legislators added a temporary reprieve to its wind turbine restrictions.  

 

Mark.Urycki@ideastream.org