IKEA has announced that it plans to invest in a Canadian wind farm in Alberta with 55 turbines. The plan is that the renewable energy project will offset the electricity use of the global furniture giant's local stores and help to reduce IKEA's carbon footprint.

The 88Mw wind farm at Wintering Hills is located in the oil-rich state of Alberta, around 130km away from Calgary. It has the capacity to produce enough clean energy for 26,000 homes or 54 large IKEA stores. Already, the brand has twelve stores in Canada and plans to build more. 

IKEA has already made significant strides in its plans to become a renewable energy leader and joins other big brands such as Google and Apple which are forging ahead with corporate-level plans to become carbon neutral, particularly where they feel that government policy and progress has been insufficient to date. Due to the furniture brand's global dominance and nature of business, it is one of the largest buyers of wood and has huge energy demands for both production and retail purposes, offering real opportunities to switch from damaging fossil fuels to green energy alternatives and demonstrate the benefits to other businesses.

The brand says that it has a global ambition to generate more green energy than it consumes by 2020. It has allocated a whopping $3.2 billion for its renewable energy projects across the world and has already spent half of its budget in the last seven years.

The wind farm will be purchased from TransAlta and Teck Resources and will cost around $120 million CAD. It will the IKEA's second green energy investment in Alberta, as it bought a 46Mw wind farm in 2013 in Pincher Creek. The deal is expected to be concluded in under a month.