State-owned utility Santee Cooper, which is responsible for South Carolina’s electricity and water supplies, has expressed official interest in unfreezing the construction of two partially constructed power units at the Virgil C Summer nuclear power plant in South Carolina due to growing demand for AI data centers and carbon-free energy, Datacenter reports. Dynamics However, the press release indicates that the company does not intend to directly own or manage the new facilities.
Given the long time for commissioning new power units, the Santee Cooper has a unique opportunity for a fairly quick start for UNIT 2 and 3 power units, which can provide 2.2 GW. Since the VC Summer nuclear power plant already has security certificates, as well as sufficient land, water and infrastructure for transferring energy, commissioning is significantly reduced.
Now the only valid power unit (973 MW), launched in 1984, provides Santee Cooper and Dominion Energy customers with electricity. The expansion of the site began in 2008, then the South Carolina Electric & Gas (later replaced the name on Santee Cooper), applied for the construction of two new 1.1-gve reactors of Westinghouse AP1000 on the same site. A year later with Westinghouse, a contract was signed for the design, purchase and construction of reactors. The cost of construction was estimated at $ 9.8 billion.
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The new blocks began to be built in 2013, but by 2017 the appraisal cost of the project increased to $ 25 billion, including due to errors in the production of equipment, and in 2017, Westinghouse filed a bankruptcy application. In July of the same year, it was decided to abandon the further implementation of the project. The situation led to a major political scandal.
The increase in demand for electricity from data centers has led to a return of interest in nuclear power, as it is considered a reliable and low-carbon source of energy. Thus, AWS almost a year ago acquired a data center campus located in close proximity to the 2.5 GW Susquehanna Steam Electric Station nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. In November 2024, the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) rejected increasing the supply of electricity to the campus, but Amazon is not going to give up.
In September 2024, Microsoft signed an agreement for 20 years on the purchase of energy from the restored Three-Mile Island nuclear power plant. Owing capacities Constellation Energy expects to launch an object at 837 MW, closed in 2019 due to high capital costs in 2028. In December, Meta✴ said she was not averse to receiving in the United States up to 4 GW from nuclear power plants. Finally, some other operators of the country made the idea of restoring reactors for the sake of the data center. For example, in October, Nextra announced that it is allowing the possibility of restarting Duane Arnold nuclear power plants.