Constellation Energy plans to reopen Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the site of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, to help Microsoft meet the growing need for energy for artificial intelligence.
The Baltimore-headquartered energy company revealed on Friday that it would be restarting the plant’s Unit 1 reactor, which shut down five years ago. The revival would be the latest and most dramatic effort by the industry to meet immense power demand coming from AI-focused data centers being built by tech giants such as Microsoft, Meta, Google, and more.
Microsoft is set to benefit from the reopening of the plant as Constellation Energy said it plans to sell the energy produced by the nuclear plant to the company in a 20-year agreement. If approved by regulators, the agreement is said to help Microsoft meet its goal of matching the energy that its data centers consume with carbon-free energy.
Constellation Energy said the plant would come back online in 2028 and extend operations until at least 2054. It is to be renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center, after the company’s former CEO Chris Crane.
The reopening of the plant is expected to create more than 3,000 jobs while adding over 800 megawatts of carbon-free electricity to the grid, Constellation Energy said. It is also anticipated to boost Pennsylvania’s GDP by $16 billion, generating over $3 billion in state and federal taxes.
“This agreement is a major milestone in Microsoft’s efforts to help decarbonize the grid in support of our commitment to become carbon negative,” Bobby Hollis, Microsoft’s vice president of energy, said in a statement. “Microsoft continues to collaborate with energy providers to develop carbon-free energy sources to help meet the grids’ capacity and reliability needs.”
The Three Mile Island plant is located near Middletown, Pennsylvania, and has been closed since 2019. Its Unit 2 reactor partially melted down in March 1979. While it is considered the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission says the incident “had no detectable health effects” on employees of the plant or the public in nearby regions.
“The symbolism is enormous,” Joseph Dominguez, Constellation Energy‘s CEO, told the New York Times. “This was the site of the industry’s greatest failure, and now it can be a place of rebirth.”
In the U.S., no nuclear plant has restarted service after having been decommissioned. However, the Pennsylvania plant would not be the first, if approved. The Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan is anticipated to come back online by the end of 2025.
If approved, Three Mile Island is expected to provide Microsoft with around 835 megawatts of energy – enough to power around 800,000 homes.
It marks a major milestone in the effort to match the demand from AI data centers, which are expected to take up more of electricity generation nationwide. Earlier this year, the Electric Power Research Institute estimated that data centers could consume upward of 9% by 2030 — more than double the amount used right now. To relieve strain on the grid, tech companies have begun pushing for co-locating data centers next to nuclear plants.
Amazon also recently entered an agreement with Talen Energy to purchase the decades-old Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. However, the agreement has been criticized by utility companies that say it will lead to less power available on the grid, harming consumers.
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