Sustainable Energy: AWS Wind Farms

Yesterday Amazon Web Services announced its largest sustainable energy initiative yet, and perhaps the most ambitious in the cloud industry: building a 208 megawatt wind farm called Amazon Wind Farm US East in North Carolina. In conjunction with the already launched Amazon Solar Farm US East this pushes AWS's largest region towards being entirely powered by sustainable energy, and demonstrates AWS is actively meeting its lofty green goals.

AWS's 2014 commitment to have 100% of its global infrastructure powered by sustainable energy is exactly the type of Think Ahead ambition that solidifies it as a key strategic partner for Acquia. AWS leads the public cloud pack by offering three completely carbon neutral regions including US-West (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt) and AWS GovCloud (US). Since Acquia Cloud runs in 7 AWS regions, and we are extensive users of the US-East region, we are thrilled to see advances in power generation for the region.

In the years since AWS's original sustainable energy announcement they have been aggressively expanding their use of sustainable energy and pushing the cloud industry towards a brighter future. In May 2015 AWS passed 25% of global infrastructure consumption coming from sustainable energy sources and they are on track for making 40% by the end of 2016. With Gartner reporting that Amazon Web Services is 10x larger than its next 14 competitors combined it is evident that Amazon is pushing the industry in a big way towards sustainability.

Acquia shares AWS's thinking that the greenest power is that which is not consumed. Acquia Cloud's elastic scaling allows our customers to benefit from efficiently running their workloads in the cloud. According to analysis by AWS and others, cloud customers run 77% fewer servers, consume 84% less power, and reduce carbon emissions by 88%. The promise of the cloud is to efficiently and nimbly move around workloads, so we're excited to see results such as these.

At Acquia we're constantly striving to improve our own energy efficiency and sustainability. We're thrilled that AWS is delivering on its promises. Wind power accelerates the cloud ecosystem and is important for all involved.