OREANDA-NEWS. Online retailer Amazon has struck a deal with Iberdrola Renewables to build a 208MW wind farm in North Carolina to power its southeastern US data centers.

The 208MW Amazon Wind Farm US East will be North Carolina's largest utility-scale wind installation when it begins commercial operations in December 2016, Amazon said yesterday. Terms of the deal with were not made public.

The facility, located across northeastern coastal Perquimans and Pasquotank counties, will generate about 670,00MWh/yr for Amazon Web Services, bringing the total renewable generation purchased by Amazon's cloud computing division to 1.3mn MWh/yr.

North Carolina governor Pat McCrory (R) credited the Amazon project as a major step towards diversifying the state's generation mix, which previously did not contain any utility-scale wind capacity, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

Amazon last year set a voluntary long-term goal of supplying its data centers 100pc renewable power, with a near-term goal of 40pc by the end of 2016.

"This agreement and those previously in place, puts Amazon Web Services on track to surpass our goal of 40pc renewable energy globally by the end of 2016," vice president of infrastructure Jerry Hunter said. "We will continue to strongly encourage our partners in government to extend the tax incentives that make it more viable for renewable projects to get off the ground."

The company in April agreed to buy an expected 170,00MWh/yr output from a planned 80MW solar farm in Virginia, the largest in that state. Amazon in January entered into an agreement with Pattern Energy Group to build and operate a 150MW wind farm in northwestern Indiana, due on line in January 2016. The project will provide Amazon with about 500,000MWh/yr.