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.
