U.S. Department of Energy: a $4.2 billion loan for modernization and increase in power.

The United States Department of Energy (DOE) announced the so-called "conditional commitment" to provide a loan of up to $4.2 billion to finance uprating and modernization projects at three Vistra Corp nuclear plants: Beaver Valley, Davis-Besse, and Perry

Planned investments in the Beaver Valley plant in Pennsylvania, as well as in the Davis-Besse and Perry plants in Ohio, will enable the production of additional amounts of electricity from existing nuclear capacities without the need to build new transmission corridors or new plants. In addition, the financial package supports extending the operation of these facilities for an additional 20 years beyond the expiration of their current licenses.

According to the Department of Energy, the project will preserve nearly 4 gigawatts (GW) of reliable baseload capacity and add 433 megawatts (MW) of new nuclear capacity. This will significantly contribute to meeting the rising demand for electricity in Pennsylvania, Ohio and across the PJM regional grid, which covers 13 U.S. states (Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia). The investments will create about 3,000 jobs in engineering, construction and outage-related work, while preserving thousands of permanent jobs.

The DOE's Office of Financing Energy Dominance (the name of President Donald Trump’s program for an ambitious energy investment program in the United States) also includes the option to finance potential future upratings at Vistra's Comanche Peak nuclear plant in Texas. This investment is carried out under President Donald Trump's executive order on revitalizing the nuclear industrial base.

American Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated that obtaining more power from existing plants provides more affordable and reliable energy for American households and the economy, while the director of the Office of Financing Energy Dominance Gregory Beard emphasized that these investments extend reactor lifetimes and deliver abundant baseload energy for the coming decades.

Moreover, it is interesting that this capacity increase comes at a time when Vistra has signed massive long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) with leading tech giants. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has signed a 20-year purchase agreement to buy up to 1,200 megawatts from the Comanche Peak plant, while Meta has signed 20-year agreements covering 2,176 megawatts from the Perry and Davis-Besse plants, with the purchase of additional energy that will result from uprating these plants and the Beaver Valley facility.

Also, note that this type of production increase—raising reactor power, the so-called "uprating" which is achieved largely by increasing the efficiency of various components of the energy system—is considered the cheapest and most efficient way to increase the production capacity of a grid. 

S.A.