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Constellation Energy inked the deal, but the whole industry stands to benefit.
After Three Mile Island, what’s next?
That’s the question the nuclear industry and those who follow it were asking after news broke Friday that Constellation Energy was planning to reboot the facility’s Unit 1, which shut down in 2019. The deal is being anchored by Microsoft, which will purchase the power in order to balance out the emissions generated by its facilities in the PJM Interconnection, the multi-state power market that includes Pennsylvania. The plant is expected to be operational by 2028, Constellation said, and will be called the Crane Clean Energy Center, in honor of the company's former chief executive.
The demand for non-carbon-emitting power — and all power — has grown since Unit 1 closed and is expected to continue to in the future, especially as tech companies like Microsoft seek to build more datacenters while complying with their pledges to power their operations without greenhouse gas emissions.
The days of nuclear power plants shuttering not because of old age, safety concerns, or local opposition, but because of the economics of subsidized wind and solar and cheap natural gas, are likely over. New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois all provided subsidies to their state’s nuclear fleet as plants were threatened with closure. California’s Diablo Canyon plant has seen its decommissioning delayed and received federal aid to help stay open. At a time when states representing a big chunk of US power consumption have aggressive emissions reduction goals and worries about power reliability, money is often easily found to keep nuclear plants open.
And now much of that cash might be coming from the private sector, specifically technology companies and independent power producers like Constellation.
“What we’re seeing is the fruits of previous labors coupled with the first-time-in-a-generation demand signals we had not yet seen,” Brett Rampal, a senior director at Veriten, an energy advisory company, told me.
These companies want the 24/7 carbon-free power that nuclear can uniquely provide. The federal government and several state capitals are also committed to bolstering the economics of America’s largest non-greenhouse-gas emitting, firm power source.
The Inflation Reduction Act contains considerable subsidies for both investing in and producing nuclear energy, as well as tools to finance nuclear power.
If history is any indication, having public and corporate policy rowing in the same direction can provide a huge boost for clean energy. For wind and solar, the two biggest demand boosters pulling forward their adoption has been technology companies wanting to buy clean power and federal subsidies for their construction and operation.
The structure Microsoft is using to purchase this power, the corporate power purchase agreement, was pioneered by Google in the late 2000s as a way for technology companies to support the development of clear power even when they couldn’t directly consume it. Now these tools are being used to support nuclear power. Constellation said Friday that the deal was the largest single power purchase agreement in history. According to figures worked out by Rampal, the deal will lead to some 135 terawatt-hours of generation over 20 years (a bit short of the annual electricity generation of Argentina), generating some $13.5 billion of revenue.
“Nobody would be moving forward with these projects,” explained Rampal, without tax credits or “extremely favorable loan support from the Loans Program Office.”
The other shuttered nuclear plant looking to restart, Michigan’s Palisades, has a $1.5 billion loan guarantee from the LPO.
“Constellation will be spending $1.6 billion of its own money to restart the plant – no state or federal aid. We may look at whether to seek a DOE loan for some of the financing, but that is not a given and not needed to make the project work. And even in that scenario, all the money is paid back in full. It’s just a slightly better interest rate,” Paul Adams, a Constellation spokesman, told me.
“The IRA contained nuclear production tax credits, which any nuclear plant is eligible for. The Crane Clean Energy Center would be no different once it is up and operating. That tax credit simply provides a floor price, in essence, to support nuclear production,” Adams said.
Almost immediately after the deal was announced attention turned to the Duane Arnold Energy Center plant in Iowa, which shut down in 2020 but whose owner, NextEra, has said could be a candidate for being relaunched.
After that, Rampal said, “there are tons of conversations around power uprates,” which is when nuclear plant operators install new equipment or alter the operation of existing plants to make them more powerful.
According to one study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Koroush Shirvan, uprates could increase the capacity of America’s nuclear fleet by 50%. Actual uprates tend to be far more modest (and the paper acknowledges such dramatic uprates “are aspirational and may not be practical”). The last 10 uprates have averaged 1.6%, according to data collected by the Nuclear Energy Institute.
“Many more nuclear plants could be more aggressive with uprates. There’s technology out there that could produce more power,” Mark Nelson, managing director at Radiant Energy Group, told me.
The Loan Program Office can fund these upgrades and they will benefit from tax credits alongside other existing nuclear plants.
Microsoft is not the first technology company to get into the nuclear game, although many observers have long suspected it would. Alongside Google and Nucor, the company has committed to nurturing so-called clean-firm generation to help power operations on a 24/7 basis in a way that existing renewable generation cannot. The company has made several notable hires of nuclear industry veterans in the past few years.
“There’s nowhere in the USA where you can suddenly get power needed by Microsoft while making it additional,” besides bringing new nuclear power onto the grid, Nelson told me, referring to the concept that to fully prevent carbon emissions from new corporate activity, the non-carbon-emitting energy acquired has to be new to the grid. “Not just 24/7, but 24/7 at one location.”
Microsoft’s nuclear deal is also the second major one inked by a technology company just this year. Amazon purchased a data center site co-located at another Pennsylvania nuclear plant in March. That plan to link up a data center with the Susquehanna nuclear power plant has been controversial as it is “behind-the-meter,” meaning it would be powering Amazon’s facility directly, not providing power to the grid under a power purchase agreement like Microsoft will be doing with Constellation. Some argue it would still shift costs to others on the grid. The Amazon deal also does not provide any new clean power, it simply reallocates it to a big customer.
But there are only so many existing nuclear power plants that could uprate or recently-shut plants that could restart, but whatever new nuclear power does come online, there will likely be a technology company eager to scoop it up.
“We need to stamp out nuclear plants of designs that work now and lock in new construction,” Nelson told me. “We’re in a time of extreme scarcity.”
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.