By Laila Kearney
THREE MILE ISLAND, Pennsylvania (Reuters) -The former Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania may restart in 2027, about a year ahead of schedule after being put on a fast track to connect to the regional grid, executives with the plant’s owner Constellation Energy said on Wednesday.
Constellation struck a deal last September to power Microsoft data centers, paving the way to reopen Three Mile Island, widely known as the site of a partial meltdown in 1979 that chilled the nuclear industry.
Constellation’s 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft is emblematic of the dramatic lengths Big Tech has been willing to go to fuel its artificial intelligence expansion, which began to intensify a year-and-a-half ago.
The reactor re-entering service at Three Mile Island, which is being renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center, was not part of the 1979 accident, and shut in 2019 for economic reasons.
“We’re on track to make history ahead of schedule, helping America achieve energy independence, supercharge economic growth, and win the global AI race,” Constellation CEO Joe Dominguez said.
At the time of the restart announcement last year, Constellation said it expected the plant to re-open in 2028. Officials with the company said they expected the process to be slowed by wait times associated with connecting power projects to the regional grid, which is operated by PJM Interconnection.
Power projects can linger in PJM’s queue, which is essentially the application and engineering study process to hook up a power plant to the broader grid. PJM’s territory spans 13 states and the District of Columbia, covering about 67 million customers.
As a way to alleviate some of that bottleneck, particularly as data centers rapidly proliferate on PJM’s territory, the country’s largest grid operator has fast-tracked its interconnection process for select projects.
As the technology industry drives U.S. electricity demand to record highs, nuclear power has broadly seen a resurgence of interest after decades in decline.
New York said this week it plans to build a new nuclear power plant, which would be one of the first to be constructed in a generation.
Despite the enthusiasm, nuclear power plant projects have historically been far over budget and behind schedule.
No fully shut nuclear power plant has been restarted, but at least one other attempted restart – of the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan – is under way.
(Reporting by Laila Kearney; Editing by Sonali Paul)
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