DOE offers over $9 billion in loans to upgrade nuclear power plants
The U.S. Department of Energy has authorized over $9 billion in conditional loan commitments to upgrade nuclear power plants across the country, including in Western Pennsylvania.
The department first announced a conditional loan commitment of up to $4.2 billion to finance modernization efforts in Vistra Corp’s nuclear fleet in Pennsylvania and Ohio, including the Beaver Valley Power Station in Shippingport, Beaver County.
Vistra’s planned investments at the Beaver Valley location — and Davis-Besse and Perry nuclear power plants in Ohio — will produce more electricity from plants without requiring new transmission corridors or new generation resources, according to the department.
The projects will preserve the nearly 4 gigawatts of baseload power, or the amount of energy consistently demanded of an electrical grid, while adding 433 megawatts of new nuclear capacity in Pennsylvania, Ohio and across the 13-state PJM Interconnection power grid region, according to the department. The investments are expected to support roughly 3,000 jobs in engineering, construction and planned outage work while preserving thousands of others.
On Oct. 27, the department announced another conditional loan commitment of up to $5 billion for modernization upgrades to Constellation Energy’s fleet, including another Pennsylvania power station, as well as plants in Maryland and Illinois.
Constellation’s investments at the Limerick Clean Energy Center near Philadelphia, and other nuclear power plants in Braidwood, Byron, Clinton, Dresden, LaSalle and Quad Cities in Illinois, and Calvert Cliffs in Maryland, will cumulatively add an estimated 1.1 gigawatts of electrical capability across these facilities, according to the department. Those investments are expected to support over 10,000 project-related jobs.
