Meta signs twenty-year nuclear energy deal with Constellation Energy

From the article:

Meta announced Tuesday morning that it was paying billions of dollars to keep an Illinois nuclear power plant running through 2047. The social media company will buy all the “clean energy attributes” of Constellation Energy’s Clinton Clean Energy Center, a 1.1 gigawatt nuclear power plant in central Illinois, starting in June 2027.

Electricity will still flow to the local grid, so Meta’s purchase won’t directly power one of its data centers, though the company does have one about two hours north of Clinton in DeKalb. Rather, the deal is a bit of carbon accounting to lower the company’s overall climate impact. It doesn’t reduce emissions on the grid, but prevents them from potentially increasing.

Neither company disclosed exact financial terms, but the multibillion-dollar deal will help Constellation relicense the plant and guarantee a customer for the duration of that license extension.

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Meta and Constellation have alluded to the deal as a way to save the nuclear power plant from shutdown, though neither said it was at imminent risk of closure.

The power provider initially planned to shut down the Clinton reactor in June 2017 as it faced stiff competition from cheap natural gas, but Illinois legislators stepped in with subsidies that encouraged Constellation to keep the lights on. Those subsidies are set to expire in 2027, and Constellation says the Meta deal will help prevent the closure.