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IKEA building its own personal wind farm

Furniture retail giant plans to generate enough electricity from the wind farm to power the equivalent of 17 IKEA stores in Sweden.

Candace Lombardi
In a software-driven world, it's easy to forget about the nuts and bolts. Whether it's cars, robots, personal gadgetry or industrial machines, Candace Lombardi examines the moving parts that keep our world rotating. A journalist who divides her time between the United States and the United Kingdom, Lombardi has written about technology for the sites of The New York Times, CNET, USA Today, MSN, ZDNet, Silicon.com, and GameSpot. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET.
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Candace Lombardi

The IKEA Group will soon have its own wind farm in Dalarna County, Sweden.

The Swedish furniture retail giant announced today it's partnered with Stockholm-based O2 to oversee the construction and maintenance of a nine-turbine wind farm slated to be completed in 2012.

At full capacity the wind farm is expected to generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of 17 IKEA stores in Sweden.

Owning a wind farm in Sweden will enable IKEA to further its ultimate goal of running on 100 percent renewable energy to power, heat, and cool its facilities in Sweden, the company said in a statement.

IKEA has already made headway into the transition to renewable power, buying three wind farms in France from Volkswind in 2009, and six German-based wind farms from Spain's Gamesa in 2010. It now currently owns 52 wind turbines that together generate about 10 percent of the IKEA Group's total energy use, according to company estimates.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed but an IKEA spokeswoman did tell the financial news service Bloomberg that building the wind farm was expected to cost IKEA "several hundred million kronor" (100 million is about $15.6 million).