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A comment on Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas.

Re:Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas by achow on Sunday September 18, 2016 @09:56AM (#12525311)
Seems that in a single swipe Amazon would more than double the total USA’s wind generation capacity when this goes into production in 2017. A really fantastic achievement (or am I missing something in the data?).

Total US wind energy in 2015: 73,992 megawatts [1]

Amazon’s Scurry County Texas capacity: 1 million megawatts

[1] http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/7-Charts-That-Sh...

Edit..

From the replies it seems it would be at best ~0.3% of total wind generation capacity in USA.

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Re:Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas by dmclain on Sunday September 18, 2016 @10:06AM (#12525346)
They listed MWh/y which is a pretty strange unit. The farm is 253 MW, so not a significant percentage of total US generation.

Source: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-ne...

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Re:Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas by Reason077 on Sunday September 18, 2016 @11:01AM (#12525557)
Nothing strange at all about MWh/year. A MWh is just 1000 kWh, which is a very standard unit of energy.

With wind farms it makes more sense to talk about it's production in MWh rather than it's capacity in MW. The actual energy produced by a 253 MW array will vary significantly based on where it is sited, etc.

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Re:Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas by tlb on Sunday September 18, 2016 @11:40AM (#12525710)
hours/year (= 1/8765.76) is a strange factor by which to multiply a perfectly good SI unit (MW).
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Re:Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas by dgemm on Sunday September 18, 2016 @02:05PM (#12526329)
Objectively it is strange, but it is the norm in that industry.
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Re:Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas by Reason077 on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @12:06PM (#12540564)
The watt (and hence kW and MW) are measurements of power, not energy. kWh (and MWh) are common, internationally accepted units for measuring energy.

Wind (and solar) energy production tends to vary seasonally, so it makes sense to use a year rather than some other time unit when discussing how much energy these things can produce.

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Re:Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas by david-given on Sunday September 18, 2016 @10:07AM (#12525351)
That's one million megawatt hours. Watt-hours are the most confusing unit ever, and measure energy, not power. (A watt-hour is the amount of energy produced by one watt for an hour.)

1e6 MW hours = 3.6e15 joules. The power plant generates this over a year, so that 3.6e15 joules / year = 114 MW on average.

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Re:Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas by Retric on Sunday September 18, 2016 @10:07AM (#12525350)
No, "1,000,000 megawatt hours of wind energy annuall."

/ 365 / 24 = 114 MWh per hour on average. Or ~250 MW nameplate power depending on capacity factor.

Ed: They list 253 MW.

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Re:Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas by windchick on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @01:05AM (#12537189)
They imply 45 cap factor with the 1,000,000 MWh which is expected for Scurry Co and the newer turbines. 1000000/(253*8760) ...rounded ignoring leap year.
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Re:Introducing Amazon Wind Farm Texas by csours on Sunday September 18, 2016 @10:07AM (#12525349)
I upvoted you for contributing to the discussion, not for being correct.

It looks like Amazon is adding 1 gigawatt across five projects, to the existing 75 gigawatts.

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