Will Microsoft’s Wind Of Change Hit Amazon?

Last week, Microsoft bought a wind farm – and the wind of change might just blow in Amazon’s direction next.

Microsoft has signed for the entire output of the 175MW Pilot Hill project in Illinois for the next 20 years. Under the deal Microsoft signs a contract, and its energy partner, EDF will buy Pilot Hill. It follows another wind power deal in Texas.

Wind of change

It’s similar to contracts signed by BT and  Google, and commitments from the likes of Rackspace. These arrangements are reckoned to be better than simply paying a renewable tariff to a utility, as they fund investment in renewable energy directly, and don’t just buy up the existing supply of renewables.

It’s a big deal. The farm operates at peak power of 175MW – although wind availability will cut the actual delivered power of course. However, Microsoft’s blog says it could produce a total of 675000 MWh over per year.  Crunching those figures, it seems the average output is about 77MW, or a 44 percent capacity factor, which is pretty good for a wind farm (Wikipedia tells me the record is about 60 percent).

No-one is saying how much the deal is costing, but we can assume Microsoft is paying a premium over “dirty” power. It is funding this through its own internal carbon tax which it calls a “carbon fee”.

This gets Microsoft kudos from the environmental campaigners. But as often happens,  Greenpeace takes the opportunity to take a dig at its current hate figure, Amazon.

“Microsoft’s large purchases of wind energy in Illinois and Texas, taken alongside the commitments by cloud competitors Rackspace and Google to power their respective operations with 100 [percent] renewable energy, highlight the failure by Amazon Web Services to reach even the starting line in the race to build a clean cloud and green internet,” said a statement from Greenpeace energy campaigner David Pomerantz.

“As other companies move to embrace solar and wind, AWS risks losing business from customers that are beginning to expect their cloud to be powered by renewable energy.”

This may be true. Greenpeace also marks Amazon down for lack of transparency in where it gets its power. The cloud giant has simply remained silent on the issue, though its data center guru James Hamilton has tipped his hat respectfully to some renewable efforts , while expressing doubts about others.

Amazon seems to say (as Facebook used to) that simply reducing energy is the main thing, rather than where it comes from. But energy campaigners believe a shift to renewable energy needs a helping hand from big consumers.

Microsoft’s combination of an internal tax and power purchase agreements is winning friends. Amazon may have to follow suit.

A version of this article appeared on Green Data Center News.