Amazon has announced its first renewable energy project in Australia as part of efforts to reach an 80% clean energy target by 2024 and 100% by 2040.

The 60MW solar energy project will be built in New South Wales and will generate 142,000MWh of energy per annum, once online in 2021. The project will generate enough energy to power 23,000 average Australian households.

Amazon has also announced three additional projects, a 122MW onshore wind energy project in Vasternorrland, Sweden, which is expected to come online in 2022; a 50MW solar energy farm in Zaragoza in Spain; and a 65MW solar plant in Halifax County in the US state of Virginia.

The four projects have the capacity to power the equivalent of 76,000 average US households.

The projects will produce 300MW and approximately 840,000MWh of additional renewable capacity to the grids that supply energy to data centres owned and operated by Amazon Web Services.

Globally, Amazon has 86 renewable energy projects that have the capacity to generate over 2,300MW and deliver more than 6.3 million MWh of energy annually.

To date, Amazon has launched 26 utility-scale wind and solar renewable energy projects that will generate over 2,200MW of renewable capacity and deliver more than 6.2 million MWh of clean energy annually – enough to power 560,000 US homes.

The firm has installed more than 50 solar rooftops on fulfilment centres and sort centres around the globe that generate 122MW of renewable capacity and deliver 193,000MWh of clean energy annually.

“We’re on a mission to meet the Paris Agreement 10 years early as part of The Climate Pledge commitment to be net-zero carbon across our operations by 2040,” said Kara Hurst, the vice president of sustainability at Amazon. “In addition to the environmental benefits inherently associated with running applications in the cloud, investing in renewable energy is a critical step toward addressing our carbon footprint globally.”

Originally posted on Smart Energy International.