Meta on Tuesday said it had struck an agreement to keep one nuclear reactor of a US utility company in Illinois operating for 20 years.
Meta’s deal with Constellation Energy is the social networking company’s first with a nuclear power plant. Other large tech companies are looking to secure electricity as US power demand rises significantly in part due to the needs of artificial intelligence and datacenters. Google has reached agreements to supply its datacenters with nuclear power via a half-dozen small reactors built by a California utility company. Microsoft’s similar contract will restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the site of the most serious nuclear accident and radiation leak in US history.
Illinois helps subsidize Constellation Energy’s nuclear plant, the Clinton Clean Energy Center, with a ratepayer-funded zero-emissions credit program that awards benefits for the generation of power virtually free of carbon emissions. That expires in 2027, when Meta’s power purchase agreement will support the plant with an unspecified amount of money to help with relicensing and operations.
The deal allows Constellation to expand Clinton, which has a capacity of 1,121 megawatts, by 30MW. The plant powers the equivalent of about 800,000 US homes. Clinton began operating in 1987 and last year Constellation applied with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to renew its license through 2047.
The deal could serve as a model for other big tech companies to support existing nuclear while they also plan to power datacenters with new nuclear and other energy sources.
Urvi Parekh, head of global energy at Meta, said: “One of the things that we hear very acutely from utilities is they want to have certainty that power plants operating today will continue to operate.”
Joe Dominguez, CEO of Constellation, said, “We’re definitely having conversations with other clients, not just in Illinois, but really across the country, to step in and do what Meta has done, which is essentially give us a backstop so that we could make the investments needed to relicense these assets and keep them operating.”
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Bobby Wendell, an official at a unit of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said the agreement will deliver a “stable work environment” for workers at the plant.
