As tech companies scramble to secure new sources of energy, Microsoft on Friday announced a 20-year deal to restart a nuclear reactor at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island — a facility made infamous by a partial meltdown in 1979.
The deal is a power purchase agreement (PPA) between Microsoft and the clean energy company Constellation to bring a 835-megawatt nuclear reactor back online. The plant was mothballed in 2019 due to economic issues, according to the energy company.
In a LinkedIn post, Constellation CEO Joseph Dominguez called the arrangement, “a win for Pennsylvania’s economy, a big step for Microsoft in its efforts to help decarbonize the grid, and a key milestone as we advance the clean energy transition.”
He also noted that the reactor being restarted, called TMI Unit 1, “was among the safest and most reliable power generators in the U.S.” The partial meltdown impacted TMI-2. The facility is getting a new name in the deal, Crane Clean Energy Center, and is expected to become operational by 2028.
Power demand is rising as Microsoft ramps up construction of new, power-hungry data centers in order to support the increased use of artificial intelligence and generative AI.
At the same time, the Redmond, Wash.-based company has ambitious carbon reduction targets that are becoming more difficult to meet.
“We’re dedicating significant resources to advancing this goal and adding carbon-free electricity and capacity in the grids where we operate,” Bobby Hollis, Microsoft’s vice president of energy, wrote in a blog announcing the nuclear deal.
That has the company looking at essentially every viable source of clean power, including nuclear, wind, solar and improvements to the grid, as well as emerging technologies such as fusion, sustainable biomass and batteries. Last December, Microsoft leaders published a policy brief outlining their interest in nuclear fission and fusion.
“Alongside our extensive work on carbon reduction and carbon removal, Microsoft embraces this multi-technology approach as an essential pathway to achieving our goal of becoming carbon negative by 2030,” Hollis said.
In May 2023, the tech company signed a power purchase agreement with Seattle-area’s Helion Energy to buy electricity from the fusion startup — if Helion is able to deliver on its plans to build a commercial fusion power plant in Washington by 2028.
Amazon is likewise scrambling to expand its clean energy portfolio to support its data center growth.
In March, news broke that Amazon Web Services was spending $650 million on a data center in Pennsylvania that’s plugged into the nation’s sixth largest nuclear power plant, providing up to 960 megawatts of carbon-free energy for its operations.
But clean energy supplies aren’t keeping up. Tech company operations are also tapping coal and natural gas to feed data center electricity needs.
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