Amazon signs 36MW Shetland wind PPA with Statkraft for 2030 delivery

Amazon will offtake some 36MW of capacity from Mossy Hill, a wind farm Statkraft is developing near Lerwick in Shetland, once the project begins operating — a milestone the developer places in 2030. The agreement, announced on 30 September, adds a Scottish onshore wind asset to a UK carbon-free energy programme Amazon now counts at more than 50 agreements and more than 1GW of capacity — and carries no price, no contract length and no indication of what share of Mossy Hill's output the 36MW represents.

Statkraft's UK and Ireland country manager, Kevin O'Donovan, described the partnership as what gives the developer the certainty to move Mossy Hill forward, and placed the project in Shetland's history of energy production as the country shifts toward homegrown renewable power. The function of a contract signed before the asset exists is to make the asset financeable, and that is the work a hyperscaler's offtake does here: Mossy Hill is not due to generate until 2030, so the years in between have to be carried by a developer building ahead of revenue, which is precisely when a counterparty with a visible balance sheet matters more than the megawattage it takes. Amazon has bought the output of a wind farm it does not own or build, and Statkraft has bought a credit it can show to lenders and to whoever funds the project next.

The part a PPA does not transfer is what decides whether the project delivers. Consent, grid connection and the construction schedule stay with Statkraft until the wind farm runs, and those are the risks sitting between a signed contract and a 2030 electron; the buyer absorbs the price risk on the output it takes, and the developer keeps everything else.

Amazon's UK book is broader, and smaller at the project level, than the headline figure implies: of the more than 50 carbon-free energy agreements, 41 are solar installations on Amazon's own logistics estates, and the rest a combination of off-site wind and solar. The more than 1GW those agreements represent is therefore spread across generation sited on the company's own property and a smaller set of grid-connected projects such as Mossy Hill, a distinction worth keeping for anyone reading a corporate offtake count as a proxy for utility-scale demand.

Shetland is the second Scottish wind farm Amazon has contracted this year, following the 90MW PPA it signed in June for the Chirmorie wind farm in South Ayrshire, operated by Egg Power; its regional agreements also take in ERG in Northern Ireland, Iberdrola in East Anglia and Ocean Winds in Scotland. Against the 199MW Amazon took from Swedish wind in August, the Shetland volume is under a fifth, a spread that says this procurement is a series of project-level contracts of very different sizes.

The shape of those contracts differs as well. At Fagerasen, the Swedish project from August, the merchant tail was the point: the hyperscaler took a slice of the wind farm and left the residual to the market, and the terms on that residual are what price the risk Amazon chose not to carry. Nothing in the Mossy Hill announcement says what happens to the capacity Amazon is not taking, so it is not yet possible to tell whether Statkraft has sold part of the output or placed the whole project's economics on a 36MW contract.

When Statkraft's 150 GWh offtake was announced without a price last week, the argument was that a contract arriving as a volume and nothing else tells you about demand and nothing about value. Mossy Hill is the stronger version of that pattern — the counterparty and the site are named, the buyer's credit is visible, the delivery year is fixed — and the terms still do not surface, so the market can measure demand for Shetland wind without being able to measure what it earns.

Amazon's UK and Ireland country manager, John Boumphrey, tied the project to the £40 billion ($53bn) UK investment plan the company announced last year and targets for 2027, describing the transition to a lower-carbon economy as part of how that commitment is being put to work; the £40 billion is a figure for the whole UK business, and the announcement does not say what share of it reaches generation.

A tariff, a tenor, or the full capacity of Mossy Hill would each turn this from an announcement into a comparable, and none of them is in the release. Until one appears, the most concrete number in the Shetland deal is the year the wind farm is due to run.