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It’s hard to make assumptions about cost more than a decade out. Just ask the nuclear startup NuScale.
Every company is, in a certain light, a kind of time machine, and every new product is a missive from the past. When a group of people get together to launch a startup, they’re making a bet that in a few months or years, people are going to want what they’re selling.
In the software industry, the past isn’t too long ago. Because it is possible to code and distribute an app somewhat quickly, a new software product might have only been conceived earlier that year or a year or two earlier.
In a mature consumer-product field — like, say, the car industry — the timeline is longer. A model year 2024 car might have first been conceived of in 2022, and it probably relies on a deeper engineering structure — a “platform” — that might date back to 2018 or earlier. Every new car contains, in essence, two-year-old technology.
But in the “hard tech” industry, the delay can be even longer. It can take more than a decade to get a new type of airplane or power plant to market. These types of technology are the biggest bet of all — because by the time the missive reaches its destination, the world may have changed.
So it was with NuScale, an Oregon-based company developing a small, modular nuclear reactor. Last week, NuScale announced that it was pulling out of a Department of Energy-backed, first-of-a-kind project in Utah.
The company had once planned to build six small, modular nuclear reactors in Utah in conjunction with the Idaho National Laboratory. But despite receiving more than $1 billion in Department of Energy subsidies, NuScale could not make the economics of its project work.
The main problem was that NuScale’s electricity was too expensive. Over the past two years, the estimated price of its project surged, rising by more than 75%. Because electricity projects have to recoup their costs from selling power, those high construction costs helped increase the estimated cost of the project’s electricity by 53%.
By the end, NuScale estimated that power from the project would cost $89 per megawatt-hour. (The average cost of residential electricity in Utah is about $20 per megawatt hour.) Of course, nuclear energy can provide benefits beyond what is captured by price — it is one of the few energy sources that can provide 24/7, zero-carbon electricity — but some costs are too high. NuScale struggled to sell its electrons to nearby towns: It simply could not compete with cheaper electricity from natural gas, solar, or other fuels.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this: NuScale’s smaller size and modular design were supposed to result in lower costs. In essence, NuScale hoped that cost savings would emerge from learning-by-doing and economies of scale — as it got better at making small, modular reactors, it would figure out how to bring down their costs.
That wasn’t a ludicrous idea. Economies of scale have brought down the cost of solar, wind, batteries, and electric vehicles over the past decade. And that idea — that as people do something more, they figure out how to do it more cheaply and efficiently — underpins American and Chinese climate policy.
But the Utah project was the first project of its kind, so NuScale hadn’t yet had the opportunity to take advantage of those economies of scale.
NuScale “shows how much customer matters for a first-of-a-kind deployment. NuScale went down a road that would have proven to be a really interesting model if successful, but it was a lot of legwork,” Ryan Norman, a nuclear analyst at the think tank Third Way, told me. Other advanced nuclear startups have more reliable customer relationships, he added.
Even worse for NuScale, the company found itself building the project amid the worst inflation in a generation. What might have once seemed like a “boring” part of a reactor’s design could create new and spiraling costs.
For instance, NuScale’s design required a lot of concrete, Farah Benahmed, a nuclear policy analyst at Breakthrough Energy, a set of climate investment and advocacy organizations founded by Bill Gates, told me. But concrete costs have risen dramatically, increasing by more than 9% over the past two years and helping to drive the company’s spiraling costs. Other advanced reactor designs don’t rely on concrete to the same degree as NuScale, Benahmed said. (Gates has invested in Terrapower, an advanced nuclear company that competes with NuScale.)
Other key inputs into NuScale’s reactors have also surged in price. From 2021 to 2023, the cost of carbon steel piping more than doubled, according to producer price index data. The cost of fabricated steel plates rose by more than 50%, and the cost of copper wiring rose by 30%.
More broadly, NuScale was founded in 2007 — which means, almost inevitably, that the company was responding to a very different energy moment than the one we have now. At the time, the world was undergoing the first wave of widespread public concern about climate change, driven by Hurricane Katrina, An Inconvenient Truth, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth assessment report. It seemed plausible that Congress might pass a bipartisan cap-and-trade law, which would benefit zero-carbon nuclear power.
Most importantly, U.S. electricity costs were rising, and experts feared they would continue to increase in the 2010s. America’s natural gas supplies seemed to be running out, and the country was preparing to import liquified natural gas in large quantities.
Then came the fracking boom. Cheap natural gas flooded the market, reshaping the domestic energy system and moderating the rise in power prices. The United States never passed a carbon price or a cap-and-trade law. And the economics of building lots of NuScale reactors to provide zero-carbon, 24/7 electricity now look seriously different.
NuScale is not the only clean energy company to run into inflation-driven problems. The offshore-wind company Orsted recently canceled two projects on the Jersey shore due to cost and supply-chain problems. Other offshore projects are also at risk.
Nuclear advocates said that despite its issues, NuScale has accomplished something that no other nuclear startup has. It is the sole nuclear startup to receive approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency that must approve nuclear reactors before they can be used. “NuScale has paved the way for how to move through the NRC process. They’re a great example and paved the way for the industry,” Benahmed, the Breakthrough analyst, said.
That approval process took more than four years. It shows another way that it can take years or even decades for “hard tech” companies to get to market — to send their missive from the past to the present.
But despite that long timeline, advocates remain upbeat about the larger industry. “The investor base will do its due diligence to assess what business decisions went wrong with NuScale, but ultimately I think this development is less detrimental to the wave of support we've seen for advanced nuclear from that group,” Norman, the Third Way analyst, said. Because NuScale uses a small version of a light-water reactor — a conventional reactor technology that other advanced-nuclear startups have eschewed — investors probably won’t lose faith in the sector itself.
But they agreed that the make-or-break moment for nuclear is coming up. “The key decision point we need to wrestle with as we continue along the innovation path is: Who is going to lead?” Norma said. “Our allies are waiting. Our competitors are watching. Like it or not, now is the time for the U.S. and industry to prove itself. We've gotta have moxy.”
Editor's note: The original version of this article misidentified one of NuScale’s investors. We regret the error.
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Amarillo-area residents successfully beat back a $600 million project from Xcel Energy that would have provided useful tax revenue.
Power giant Xcel Energy just suffered a major public relations flap in the Texas Panhandle, scrubbing plans for a solar project amidst harsh backlash from local residents.
On Friday, Xcel Energy withdrew plans to build a $600 million solar project right outside of Rolling Hills, a small, relatively isolated residential neighborhood just north of the city of Amarillo, Texas. The project was part of several solar farms it had proposed to the Texas Public Utilities Commission to meet the load growth created by the state’s AI data center boom. As we’ve covered in The Fight, Texas should’ve been an easier place to do this, and there were few if any legal obstacles standing in the way of the project, dubbed Oneida 2. It was sited on private lands, and Texas counties lack the sort of authority to veto projects you’re used to seeing in, say, Ohio or California.
But a full-on revolt from homeowners and realtors apparently created a public relations crisis.
Mere weeks ago, shortly after word of the project made its way through the small community that is Rolling Hills, more than 60 complaints were filed to the Texas Public Utilities Commission in protest. When Xcel organized a public forum to try and educate the public about the project’s potential benefits, at least 150 residents turned out, overwhelmingly to oppose its construction. This led the Minnesota-based power company to say it would scrap the project entirely.
Xcel has tried to put a happy face on the situation. “We are grateful that so many people from the Rolling Hills neighborhood shared their concerns about this project because it gives us an opportunity to better serve our communities,” the company said in a statement to me. “Moving forward, we will ask for regulatory approval to build more generation sources to meet the needs of our growing economy, but we are taking the lessons from this project seriously.”
But what lessons, exactly, could Xcel have learned? What seems to have happened is that it simply tried to put a solar project in the wrong place, prizing convenience and proximity to an existing electrical grid over the risk of backlash in an area with a conservative, older population that is resistant to change.
Just ask John Coffee, one of the commissioners for Potter County, which includes Amarillo, Rolling Hills, and a lot of characteristically barren Texas landscape. As he told me over the phone this week, this solar farm would’ve been the first utility-scale project in the county. For years, he said, renewable energy developers have explored potentially building a project in the area. He’s entertained those conversations for two big reasons – the potential tax revenue benefits he’s seen elsewhere in Texas; and because ordinarily, a project like Oneida 2 would’ve been welcomed in any of the pockets of brush and plain where people don’t actually live.
“We’re struggling with tax rates and increases and stuff. In the proper location, it would be well-received,” he told me. “The issue is, it’s right next to a residential area.”
Indeed, Oneida 2 would’ve been smack dab up against Rolling Hills, occupying what project maps show would be the land surrounding the neighborhood’s southeast perimeter – truly the sort of encompassing adjacency that anti-solar advocates like to describe as a bogeyman.
Cotton also told me he wasn’t notified about the project’s existence until a few weeks ago, at the same time resident complaints began to reach a fever pitch. He recalled hearing from homeowners who were worried that they’d no longer be able to sell their properties. When I asked him if there was any data backing up the solar farm’s potential damage to home prices, he said he didn’t have hard numbers, but that the concerns he heard directly from the head of Amarillo’s Realtors Association should be evidence enough.
Many of the complaints against Oneida 2 were the sort of stuff we’re used to at The Fight, including fears of fires and stormwater runoff. But Cotton said it really boiled down to property values – and the likelihood that the solar farm would change the cultural fabric in Rolling Hills.
“This is a rural area. There are about 300 homes out there. Everybody sitting out there has half an acre, an acre, two acres, and they like to enjoy the quiet, look out their windows and doors, and see some distance,” he said.
Ironically, Cotton opposed the project on the urging of his constituents, but is now publicly asking Xcel to continue to develop solar in the county. “Hopefully they’ll look at other areas in Potter County,” he told me, adding that at least one resident has already come to him with potential properties the company could acquire. “We could really use the tax money from it. But you just can’t harm a community for tax dollars. That’s not what I’m about.”
I asked Xcel how all this happened and what their plans are next. A spokesperson repeatedly denied my requests to discuss Oneida 2 in any capacity. In a statement, the company told me it “will provide updates if the project is moved to another site,” and that “the company will continue to evaluate whether there is another location within Potter County, or elsewhere, to locate the solar project.”
Meanwhile, Amarillo may be about to welcome data center development because of course, and there’s speculation the first AI Stargate facility may be sited near Amarillo, as well.
City officials will decide in the coming weeks on whether to finalize a key water agreement with a 5,600-acre private “hypergrid” project from Fermi America, a new company cofounded by former Texas governor Rick Perry, says will provide upwards of 11 gigawatts to help fuel artificial intelligence services. Fermi claims that at least 1 gigawatt of power will be available by the end of next year – a lot of power.
The company promises that its “hypergrid” AI campus will use on-site gas and nuclear generation, as well as contracted gas and solar capacity. One thing’s for sure – it definitely won’t be benefiting from a large solar farm nearby anytime soon.
And more of the most important news about renewable projects fighting it out this week.
1. Racine County, Wisconsin – Microsoft is scrapping plans for a data center after fierce opposition from a host community in Wisconsin.
2. Rockingham County, Virginia – Another day, another chokepoint in Dominion Energy’s effort to build more solar energy to power surging load growth in the state, this time in the quaint town of Timberville.
3. Clark County, Ohio – This county is one step closer to its first utility-scale solar project, despite the local government restricting development of new projects.
4. Coles County, Illinois – Speaking of good news, this county reaffirmed the special use permit for Earthrise Energy’s Glacier Moraine solar project, rebuffing loud criticisms from surrounding households.
5. Lee County, Mississippi – It’s full steam ahead for the Jugfork solar project in Mississippi, a Competitive Power Ventures proposal that is expected to feed electricity to the Tennessee Valley Authority.
A conversation with Enchanted Rock’s Joel Yu.
This week’s chat was with Joel Yu, senior vice president for policy and external affairs at the data center micro-grid services company Enchanted Rock. Now, Enchanted Rock does work I usually don’t elevate in The Fight – gas-power tracking – but I wanted to talk to him about how conflicts over renewable energy are affecting his business, too. You see, when you talk to solar or wind developers about the potential downsides in this difficult economic environment, they’re willing to be candid … but only to a certain extent. As I expected, someone like Yu who is separated enough from the heartburn that is the Trump administration’s anti-renewables agenda was able to give me a sober truth: Land use and conflicts over siting are going to advantage fossil fuels in at least some cases.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Help me understand where, from your perspective, the generation for new data centers is going to come from. I know there are gas turbine shortages, but also that solar and wind are dealing with headwinds in the United States given cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act.
There are a lot of stories out there about certain technologies coming out to the forefront to solve the problem, whether it’s gas generation or something else. But the scale and the scope of this stuff … I don’t think there is a silver bullet where it’s all going to come from one place.
The Energy Department put out a request for information looking for ways to get to 3 gigawatts quickly, but I don’t think there is any way to do that quickly in the United States. It’s going to take work from generation developers, batteries, thermal generation, emerging storage technologies, and transmission. Reality is, whether it is supply chain issues or technology readiness or the grid’s readiness to accept that load generation profile, none of it is ready. We need investment and innovation on all fronts.
How do conflicts over siting play into solving the data center power problem? Like, how much of the generation that we need for data center development is being held back by those fights?
I do have an intuitive sense that the local siting and permitting concerns around data centers are expanding in scope from the normal noise and water considerations to include impacts to energy affordability and reliability, as well as the selection of certain generation technologies. We’ve seen diesel generation, for example, come into the spotlight. It’s had to do with data center permitting in certain jurisdictions, in places like Maryland and Minnesota. Folks are realizing that a data center comes with a big power plant – their diesel generation. When other power sources fall short, they’ll rely on their diesel more frequently, so folks are raising red flags there. Then, with respect to gas turbines or large cycle units, there’s concerns about viewsheds, noise and cooling requirements, on top of water usage.
How many data center projects are getting their generation on-site versus through the grid today?
Very few are using on-site generation today. There’s a lot of talk about it and interest, but in order to serve our traditional cloud services data center or AI-type loads, they’re looking for really high availability rates. That’s really costly and really difficult to do if you’re off the grid and being serviced by on-site generation.
In the context of policy discussions, co-location has primarily meant baseload resources on sites that are serving the data centers 24/7 – the big stories behind Three Mile Island and the Susquehanna nuclear plant. But to be fair, most data centers operational today have on-site generation. That’s their diesel backup, what backstops the grid reliability.
I think where you’re seeing innovation is modular gas storage technologies and battery storage technologies that try to come in and take the space of the diesel generation that is the standard today, increasing the capability of data centers in terms of on-site power relative to status quo. Renewable power for data centers at scale – talking about hundreds of megawatts at a time – I think land is constraining.
If a data center is looking to scale up and play a balancing act of competing capacity versus land for energy production, the competing capacity is extremely valuable. They’re going to prioritize that first and pack as much as they can into whatever land they have to develop. Data centers trying to procure zero-carbon energy are primarily focused on getting that energy over wires. Grid connection, transmission service for large-scale renewables that can match the scale of natural gas, there’s still very strong demand to stay connected to the grid for reliability and sustainability.
Have you seen the state of conflict around renewable energy development impact data center development?
Not necessarily. There is an opportunity for data center development to coincide with renewable project development from a siting perspective, if they’re going to be co-located or near to each other in remote areas. For some of these multi-gigawatt data centers, the reason they’re out in the middle of nowhere is a combination of favorable permitting and siting conditions for thousands of acres of data center building, substations and transmission –
Sorry, but even for projects not siting generation, if megawatts – if not gigawatts – are held up from coming to the grid over local conflicts, do you think that’s going to impact data center development at all? The affordability conversions? The environmental ones?
Oh yeah, I think so. In the big picture, the concern is if you can integrate large loads reliably and affordably. Governors, state lawmakers are thinking about this, and it’s bubbling up to the federal level. You need a broad set of resources on the grid to provide that adequacy. To the extent you hold up any grid resources, renewable or otherwise, you’re going to be staring down some serious challenges in serving the load. Virginia’s a good example, where local groups have held up large-scale renewable projects in the state, and Dominion’s trying to build a gas peaker plant that’s being debated, too. But in the meantime, it is Data Center Alley, and there are gigawatts of data centers that continue to want to get in and get online as quickly as possible. But the resources to serve that load are not coming online in time.
The push toward co-location probably does favor thermal generation and battery storage technologies over straight renewable energy resources. But a battery can’t cover 24/7 use cases for a data center, and neither will our unit. We’re positioned to be a bridge resource for 24/7 use for a few years until they can get more power to the market, and then we can be a flexible backup resource – not a replacement for the large-scale and transmission-connected baseload power resources, like solar and wind. Texas has benefited from huge deployments of solar and wind. That has trickled down to lower electricity costs. Those resources can’t do it alone, and there’s thermal to balance the system, but you need it all to meet the load growth.