Five years after a nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island plant in central Pennsylvania closed amid financial troubles, its owner wants to bring it back online.
Baltimore-based Constellation Energy Corp. said Friday that it has signed a 20-year agreement with Microsoft under which the technology company will purchase power from Three Mile Island Unit 1. That reactor is located at an independent facility from Unit 2, which closed in 1979 after experiencing a partial meltdown
Constellation said it would spend $1.6 billion to restart Unit 1 — and won’t seek any public subsidies — which the company said “operated at industry-leading levels of safety and reliability for decades.” Federal regulators would need to approve a restart, though it already has support from Gov. Josh Shapiro. The company said it expects the reactor to come online by 2028.
“I think policymakers have recognized that a strategy that is dependent just on wind, solar, batteries isn’t going to fully get us there and meet the needs of the system from a reliability standpoint,” Joe Dominguez, Constellation’s president and CEO, said in an interview.
For Microsoft, buying energy from the renewed plant, dubbed the Crane Clean Energy Center, will “help match the power its data centers in PJM use with carbon-free energy,” according to a news release. Valley Forge-based PJM Interconnection, a regional transmission organization, operates the electric grid in 13 states, including Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Exelon Generation pulled the plug on 837-megawatt Unit 1 in 2019 after state lawmakers declined to support legislation that would have directed hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies from Pennsylvania electric customers to the state’s nuclear industry. Exelon at the time said it couldn’t compete in markets dominated by low-cost natural gas. Constellation’s predecessor company split from Exelon in 2022.
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