NextEra Energy received a loan up to $1.9 billion from the U.S. Department of Energy to restart the Duane Arnold Energy Center nuclear power plant in Linn County, Iowa.
The power of the station is 615 megawatts. Electricity will be purchased by Google to power data centers serving AI loads.
The restart will also strengthen the reliability of the local energy grid and create “thousands of direct and indirect jobs,” according to NextEra. The agreement between the utility company and Google was announced last year, and the current loan closes the issue of financing the work. The launch of generation is scheduled for 2029.
The station had an unusual ending. A powerful storm that hit the state on August 10, 2020, with wind gusts of up to 225 kilometers per hour, destroyed the facility’s cooling towers. The decommissioning of the nuclear power plant was already planned, so after the hurricane, energy production simply stopped.
The demand for electricity from data centers actually brought the station back to life. The US Department of Energy expects to restart three mothballed nuclear power plants to provide power to both the general network and computing power for AI. The new loan was the first practical step in this direction.
Google and other data center operators have been looking for any available generation sources in recent years amid the explosive growth of AI workloads. In 2018, Google reported on its promise to offset all of its energy consumption with green and renewable sources. However, the corporation recently entered into a partnership with a gas-fired power plant to power one of its data centers in Texas.
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Competitors are following a similar path. Other players’ data centers use power from fossil fuel-heavy networks and sometimes have their own gas generators.
Against this background, Google’s nuclear deal stands out because it provides relatively clean generation in terms of emissions, although it does not solve the issue of radioactive waste management. The amount of $1.9 billion looks modest by nuclear energy standards, and until 2029 the project has a long way to go through approvals and restoration work.
