Constellation and Google go in on nuclear uprates to unlock clean power

The Trump administration wants to add 5 gigawatts of carbon-free nuclear power capacity by 2029 without deploying a single new reactor. An announcement this week by the United States’ biggest nuclear power plant operator brings that lofty goal a bit closer to reality.

On Tuesday, Constellation Energy said it would partner with Google to add 890 megawatts of generating capacity at 11 existing nuclear plants across the PJM Interconnection, the country’s biggest and most capacity-constrained electricity market. The 20-year deal is similar to a smaller deal Constellation and Meta announced last year to add 30 MW at another one of its plants and a third agreement between Georgia Power and Google to add 96 MW at two nuclear power stations in the Peach State.

All three initiatives involve power uprates, wherein power plant owners upgrade turbines, steam generators, digital control systems, and other nonnuclear infrastructure to boost energy output faster and at a fraction of the cost of building a new reactor from the ground up.

Constellation expects to finish its first Google-backed uprate by 2028 and complete the entire batch in the early 2030s, Constellation spokesperson Paul Adams told Canary Media. One project will add 348 MW of generating capacity to Constellation’s 2,317-MW Limerick nuclear plant near Philadelphia, while the 2,327-MW Salem plant in southern New Jersey will get a 97-MW boost, Adams said.

“Each plant is different, so the scale of the projects and what is being done varies plant to plant,” Adams said. ​“The generic way to describe it is that we will be adding new and more efficient equipment and technology that will allow us to get more megawatts from the same plant.”

The budget for the entire initiative tops $4.3 billion, or just over $4,800 per kilowatt, Constellation says.

That’s significantly more than the cost of utility-scale solar with energy storage, a new combined-cycle gas plant, or Constellation’s own $1.6 billion effort to restart the undamaged reactor at the Pennsylvania power plant formerly known as Three Mile Island, which the company took offline for economic reasons in 2019.

On the other hand, it’s less than half the per-kilowatt expense Georgia Power and its corporate parent, Southern Co., incurred to bring two gigawatt-scale reactors online a few years ago. Plant Vogtle Units 3 and 4 were seven years behind schedule and cost more than double the original $14 billion budget.

“For the near term, uprates are the fastest, most practical and cost-effective ways to add reliable, clean nuclear capacity,” said Judi Greenwald, president and CEO of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a pro-nuclear ​“think-and-do tank.”

Once complete, Constellation’s expanded facilities will pump out carbon-free electrons almost without interruption. According to the Department of Energy, U.S. nuclear power plants have an average capacity factor of 92.3%, meaning they run at maximum rated output more than nine of every 10 hours. Combined-cycle gas plants average 59.9%, wind farms clock in at 34.3%, solar installations at 23.4%, and gas peaker plants at just 17.2%, the DOE says.

With electricity demand expected to increase more than 5% annually over the next 10 years across its 13-state footprint, and retail power prices expected to rise as much as 60% by 2030, PJM says it welcomes new capacity, even at a premium price.

“We need all the megawatts of electricity supply we can get to meet growing demand. Additional supply addresses both the reliability needs of the system and eases upward price pressure,” Jeff Shields, a spokesperson for the nonprofit grid operator, said in an email.

The Constellation uprates have supporters among the region’s solar, wind, and energy storage companies, too — in part because the project’s 20-year power purchase agreement is familiar to utility-scale renewables developers who’ve marketed clean power to tech companies for years.

“Long-term revenue agreements like this are essential to deploy new generation across all resource types: nuclear, solar, wind, storage, gas, and so on in PJM,” said Evan Vaughan, executive director of MAREC Action, a trade group for renewables developers and operators in the mid-Atlantic region.

Vaughan suggested there’s room for everyone to grow in a region with 67 million inhabitants and tens of gigawatts of new data center capacity expected to come online in the next 10 years. The combination of uprates and new renewable capacity is a potentially potent one, he said.

“Greenfielding of new resources remains a challenge for large, centralized power plant [developers],” Vaughan said. ​“Solar, wind, and storage continue to represent a large share of greenfield deployment in PJM.”

Despite state and local permitting rules in Ohio and other PJM states that clean energy advocates say unfairly benefit thermal generators, Vaughan may be right to see long-term tailwinds for renewables in the grid operator’s territory and beyond.

Constellation’s uprate announcement came one day after the DOE unveiled a $4.2 billion loan to extend the lives of three nuclear plants owned by Vistra, a Constellation competitor, in Pennsylvania and Ohio. The loan will also underwrite 433 MW of previously announced uprates at the plants, with Meta as the offtaker.

Those two deals represent the lion’s share of potential uprates in PJM and a significant chunk of the estimated 3 GW to 5 GW of uprate potential nationwide, Julien Dumoulin-Smith, a senior energy-sector analyst for the investment bank Jefferies, said in a client note Wednesday.

The longer-term and more lucrative play for independent power producers like Constellation and Vistra — which own huge amounts of centralized generation but aren’t regulated like utilities — is to ink deals with large tech companies for more scalable forms of clean, firm capacity, Dumoulin-Smith said. Constellation said as much in its announcement with Google, he added.

“The big debate was never about whether IPPs could contract nuclear uprates, as this is [a] truly unique asset class with only 3-5GW available,” Dumoulin-Smith said. ​“The core question remains as to whether IPPs can pair up [existing generation] with capacity-only resources like battery and demand response, both of which have been explicitly called out in the [Constellation] announcement Tuesday.”

Hyperscalers are also backing two of the three nuclear reactor restarts announced so far: Microsoft at the 835-MW Three Mile Island plant, which Constellation rechristened as the Crane Clean Energy Center; and Google at the 615-MW Duane Arnold Generating Station in Iowa. Both are set to power back up before the end of the decade.

“These announcements show how both the public and private sectors are committed to expanding nuclear generation capacity,” Greenwald said, referring to the Constellation and Vistra announcements this week. ​“They also reinforce the need for a broader portfolio that includes uprates, reactor restarts, and new construction.”

But the math is clear: Uprates and restarts alone won’t power the American nuclear renaissance the Trump administration claims is underway. Most of the 300 GW of new nuclear capacity Trump wants to bring online by 2050 will have to come from new reactors — likely at a much higher cost.