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Stilp urges county to join his fight against site’s reactivation
TOM LISI
A longtime government-reform activist known for his attention-getting props and feisty public awareness campaigns urged Lancaster County commissioners Wednesday to join him in a fight to block the planned return to operation of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant.
Dauphin County-based activist Gene Stilp, who has run for office in the past as a Democrat, was clad in a business suit Wednesday with the words “NO T.M.I. RESTART” embroidered across the back of his jacket.
Stilp told the commissioners that the county government must approve new emergency preparedness plans for the plant to reopen, and they could help stop that from happening.
Baltimore-based energy giant Constellation Energy announced in September it had reached an agreement with Microsoft for the tech giant to be its sole energy customer from the facility’s main nuclear reactor, Unit 1, which shut down in 2019.
Constellation has a plan to bring the plant back online within the next three years.
“The citizens of central Pennsylvania are not Constellation Energy and Microsoft slaves,” Stilp said Wednesday. Stilp, who opposes the use of nuclear energy, argued the plant poses a safety risk to residents in the region.
Stilp was an attention-getter before social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok made attention a more universal pursuit. In 2005, he handed out stockings full of coal to Pennsylvania legislative leaders after lawmakers gave themselves pay raises.
And he is no stranger to activism against Three Mile Island: In 1999, he placed a fake historical marker near the plant commemorating the 1979 partial meltdown of one of the plant’s reactors.
Microsoft wants to use the carbon-neutral energy from Three Mile Island to power data centers connected to the region’s power grid, according to Constellation, which bought TMI in 1999.
The energy company plans to rename the plant the Crane Clean Energy Center, after a former corporate leader of Constellation, who died last year.
The plant’s second reactor, Unit 2, experienced the infamous partial meltdown in 1979 and has been decommissioned ever since.
Constellation said last year the reopening of Unit 1 would be an economic boon for the region, claiming it would create some 3,400 jobs and generate $3 billion in state and federal taxes.
Lancaster County commissioners did not respond to Stilp’s remarks at the meeting.
Democratic Commissioner Alice Yoder said via email after the meeting that the commissioners do not play a role in the restart of Three Mile Island.
“Should the plant restart, our emergency management team will follow the proper procedure to create an evacuation plan that will keep Lancaster County residents safe, as they do for all facilities in Lancaster County,” Yoder wrote. “I appreciated Mr. Stilp’s comments and plan to follow up with our Public Safety department to learn more about previous and future plans.”
Three Mile Island in Middletown is seen in this photo on April 18, 2018. Dauphin County-based activist Gene Stilp urged Lancaster County commissioners Wednesday to join him in a fight to block the planned return to operation of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant.
Governor Josh Shapiro Reaches Agreement with PJM to Prevent Unnecessary Price Hikes and Save Consumers Over $21 Billion on Utility Bills
In December, Governor Shapiro filed a lawsuit with federal energy regulators to prevent energy price hikes on 65 million consumers, including 13 million Pennsylvanians.
Governor Shapiro’s work to find a pathway to resolving this lawsuit with PJM has averted runaway prices and will save Pennsylvanians money on their electricity bills.
January 28, 2025
Harrisburg, PA – Today, Governor Josh Shapiro announced he has reached an agreement with PJM Interconnection on a plan to resolve his recent lawsuit and to save consumers over $21 billion over the next two years. In December, Governor Shapiro filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)(opens in a new tab) against PJM Interconnection, criticizing flaws in PJM’s capacity auction design that threatened to impose significant new price increases. The agreement will avoid historic price hikes on consumers across all 13 states PJM serves, including Pennsylvania.
Left unaddressed, PJM’s next capacity auction scheduled for July 2025 would have resulted in billions in unnecessary energy costs for 65 million people across the region. The Governor worked with PJM to significantly lower the capacity auction price cap – from over $500/Megawatt-Day to $325/MW-Day – averting a runaway auction price that would have unnecessarily increased energy bills.
The Commonwealth is a leading producer of energy and the nation’s largest exporter of electricity – nearly a century ago, Pennsylvania helped to found PJM, and today still serves as a generation backbone for the region. At the same time it has led this fight against unnecessary price increases on consumers, the Shapiro Administration is committed to meeting the need for new generation by getting more power projects built in Pennsylvania as part of an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy to create jobs, reduce emissions, and ensure safe, reliable, affordable power for Pennsylvanians for the long term.
“When PJM’s next auction was set to result in historic price hikes, I filed a lawsuit to stop this price hike on consumers and defend Pennsylvanians,” said Governor Shapiro. “PJM did the right thing by listening to my concerns and coming to the table to find a path forward that will save Pennsylvanians billions of dollars on their electricity bills. My Administration will continue to work to ensure safe, reliable, and affordable power for Pennsylvanians for the long term.”
PJM operates a capacity market, which means that operators are paid to commit to providing energy in the future. Over the last several years, demand for energy has risen rapidly but PJM has been slow to allow new power sources onto its grid – and as a result, PJM capacity prices have skyrocketed. PJM’s 2025/26 capacity auction, held in July 2024, resulted in costs of $14.7 billion – an over 800 percent increase from the prior year.
The Governor pushed PJM to reduce their price cap, and a diverse coalition came together support the Governor’s message, including four governors(opens in a new tab), energy and consumer advocates, and the Organization of PJM States (OPSI). The Shapiro Administration’s energy leadership promises to save the PJM region over $21 billion on utility bills in the next two years.
PJM and the Shapiro Administration have agreed to a path forward for the complaint, subject to consultation with PJM members and the PJM Board of Managers. In order to avoid further delays to the auction schedule, PJM will soon seek a FERC order by proposing a cap and floor mechanism through an FPA section 205 filing with the FERC.
This resolution follows over a year of engagement with PJM. Governor Shapiro continues to repeatedly(opens in a new tab) press for long-term solutions that address increasing costs, urging PJM to:
Homer Simpson once said, “Lord, we're especially thankful for nuclear power, the cleanest, safest energy source there is … except for solar which is just a pipe dream.” Gov. Glenn Youngkin agreed — in July, at a press conference, he said something very similar and followed it up by recently facilitating a deal between Amazon and Dominion Energy that promises new nuclear power plants in Northern Virginia. While Youngkin has tried to frame these deals as a benefit for the economy and those in it, these plants will not actually be providing cheaper, cleaner energy for regular civilians. Instead, these are plans from which Youngkin stands to gain political capital and tax revenue. In short, Youngkin is trying to entice data centers to move to Northern Virginia for his own political gain, and presenting this to the taxpayer as a service to the citizen is deceiving.
At best, Virginians will feel the effects of this project indirectly — the primary goal of this deal was to draw new data centers, particularly Amazon’s, to Northern Virginia. These large data centers require huge sources of electricity to remain operational, and placing them near neighborhoods without building new power plants would drive electricity costs for Virginians through the roof. Thus, the so-called “Data Center Alley” is forced to bring their own power into the area, which is what this new deal will work to do.
Youngkin claims that these plants would help keep energy prices stable, but in reality, his real aim is to encourage more data centers to move into the area. While the goal of building the plants, the increase of data centers and the commitment to efficient energy sources are all laudable, the way that Youngkin has sold this idea to the public is misleading — most of the benefit will be felt by larger corporations.
In fact, the direct gains of these new plants may be nonexistent for the average Virginian. Youngkin signed a law in July allowing Dominion to use tax money to help pay for power plant construction. While it is a relatively insignificant amount of money for Virginians, it means that we are subsidizing a project that does not improve the quality of life in our communities. Even if it did help some Virginians, it would not help everyone — only the areas closest to the plants in the affluent northern area. Electricity is not being shipped across the state, and the plant’s jobs are not likely to draw workers from poorer areas of Virginia. Why should taxpayers pay for one large, wealthy company to build a power plant for another large, wealthy company?
Conversely, if these plans show no tangible benefit that someone could see on their power bill, one might argue that there might be indirect reasons to build the nuclear plants like job creation. This idea would be reasonable in many areas — but not Northern Virginia. By state, Virginia has the 8th lowest unemployment rate in the United States. By county, Virginia’s most well-employed counties are concentrated in the North. Focusing on building up the low paying jobs in an already prosperous area is a ludicrous goal. If Youngkin was truly concerned with providing higher-paying jobs to poorer areas of Virginia, there are many better spots to build these plants than in Northern Virginia. His actions contradict his rhetoric, and Virginians should not be fooled.
In short, this plan is at best neutral and at worst harmful to employment rates in Virginia. But beyond that, Youngkin has also been misleading in how he describes the feasibility of the new construction. Nuclear energy is clean, efficient and safe — but in this case, it is not cheap and, thus, is not a sure thing. Youngkin has tended to focus on the future and bringing Virginia into the next generation of energy which requires making Virginian energy competitive. Rhetoric like this is certainly inspirational, but it is by no means realistic.
For example, Youngkin has promised Dominion a small modular reactor. China and Russia are the only places with SMRs as of now, and when Utah tried to build one, the costs soared to $10 billion, leading to the scrap of the project. SMRs are certainly innovative, but they come with an expensive, inherent risk of failure — something that Youngkin conveniently forgets to mention in his address on the future of Virginian energy.
Despite risks, Virginia could benefit from more nuclear power plants, but the current proposal that Youngkin advertises hardly achieves its promised benefits, something which could be remedied by being more transparent about the actual benefits. If Youngkin explained the potential downsides of the new plants, he could ease concerns that the project is not feasible. Indeed, nuclear power can be a sustainable solution in Northern Virginia, especially in a time when Artificial Intelligence calls for more power than ever. However, taxpayers have a right to know the full details of the projects their government is approving. Mr. Burns from “The Simpsons” may be secretive about the operation of his nuclear power plant, but Youngkin need not, nay, should not be.
Paul Kurtzweil is a senior associate opinion editor who writes about economics, business and housing for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at opinion@cavalierdaily.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Cavalier Daily. Columns represent the views of the authors alone
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek stunned the world with the release of its R1 model, which appears to perform nearly as well as leading models from Google and OpenAI, despite the company’s claim that it used a relatively modest number of GPUs to train it.
DeepSeek’s relative efficiency has experts and investors questioning whether AI really needs the massive hardware outlays everyone had been predicting. And that could change data center demand — and the energy needed to power them.
The company claims it ran 2,048 Nvidia H800 GPUs for two months to train a slightly older model, a fraction of the compute that OpenAI is rumored to use.
Few companies are as exposed as Nvidia, the share price of which was down 16% at the time of publishing. Perhaps even more vulnerable are the startups and power producers that are betting big on new nuclear and natural gas capacity.
Nuclear power, in particular, has been on the cusp of a renaissance for years, driven by advances in fuel and reactor designs that promise to make a new generation of power plants safer and cheaper to build and operate. Until now, there was little reason to blaze ahead. Nuclear is still expensive relative to wind, solar, and natural gas. Plus, next-generation nuclear has yet to be tested at commercial scale.
The surge in power demand from AI changed the equation. With data centers predicted to consume as much as 12% of all electricity in the U.S. — more than triple their share in 2023 — and forecasts of underpowered AI data centers by 2027, tech companies have been racing to secure new supplies, and throwing billions of dollars at the problem. Google has pledged to buy 500 megawatts of capacity from nuclear startup Kairos, Amazon led a $500 million investment in another nuclear startup, X-Energy, and Microsoft is working with Constellation Energy on a $1.6 billion renovation of a reactor at Three Mile Island.
But what if the problem has been overblown?
There is no hard and fast rule suggesting that the only way to improve AI performance is to use more compute. For a while, that tactic worked well, but more recently, more compute hasn’t yielded the same results. AI researchers have been casting about for solutions, and it’s possible that DeepSeek found one for its R1 model.
Not everyone is convinced, of course.
“While DeepSeek’s achievement could be groundbreaking, we question the notion that its feats were done without the use of advanced GPUs,” Citigroup analyst Atif Malik wrote.
Still, history suggests that even if DeepSeek is hiding something, someone else will probably find a way to make AI cheaper and more efficient. After all, it’s easier and potentially faster to task some PhDs with developing better models than it is to build new power plants.
The current wave of new reactors aren’t scheduled to come online until 2030, and new natural gas power plants won’t be available until the end of the decade at the soonest. In that context, tech companies’ power investments appear to be hedges in case their software bets don’t pan out.
If they do, expect tech companies to scale back their power ambitions. When given the choice between spending billions on physical assets or software, tech companies almost always chose the latter.
Where will that leave nuclear startups and energy companies? It depends. Some might be able to produce power at a low enough cost that it won’t matter if AI’s power needs ebb. The world is electrifying, and even before the AI bubble started inflating, demand for electricity was expected to grow.
But absent demand from AI, those cost pressures are probably going to increase. Wind, solar, and batteries are cheap and getting cheaper, and they’re inherently modular and mass-produced. Developers can roll out new renewable plants in phases, delivering electricity (and revenue) before the entire project is complete while offering some control over their future in the face of uncertain demand. The same can’t be said of a nuclear reactor or a gas turbine. Tech companies know this, which is why they’vebeenquietlyinvesting in renewables to power their data centers.
Few people predicted the current AI boom, and it’s unlikely that anyone knows how the next five years will play out. As a result, the safer bets in energy will probably flow to proven technologies that can be rapidly deployed and scaled according to a rapidly evolving market. Today, renewables fit that bill.
S&P 500 nuclear power giants Constellation Energy (CEG) and Vistra (VST) plummeted early Monday as China's private DeepSeek startup shook the markets. DeepSeek released a powerful artificial intelligence program that it claims cost just $5.6 million to build, marking a possible paradigm shift from the massive levels of investment by technology industry giants in energy and AI infrastructure.
Nuclear stocks swooned Monday during market action, marking a reverse of fortunes compared to last week. The sector had broadly advanced after President Donald Trump's announced Tuesday afternoon that Sam Altman's OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle (ORCL) are planning a joint venture called Stargate, to build data centers and other AI infrastructure in the U.S., with investments of up to $500 billion.
Renewables Leader NextEra Expanding Gas, Nuclear for AI Boom
Josh Saul 3 min read
In This Article:
(Bloomberg) -- NextEra Energy Inc., one of the world’s biggest suppliers of wind and solar power, is moving to expand its natural gas and nuclear generation in a bid to meet the surging demand for electricity sparked by artificial intelligence.
The company has partnered with gas turbine manufacturer GE Vernova Inc. to build power generation for data centers and factories, Chief Executive Officer John Ketchum said on an earnings call Friday. NextEra has also taken the first step to restarting its shuttered Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa.
US power consumption is rising, driven by data centers and AI, along with manufacturing and the increasing electrification of the economy. That’s spurred demand for new gas plants and reawakened interest in nuclear energy. The electricity boom has sparked new ideas and deals that would once have been unthinkable.
“We’re already having a lot of success with renewables, but let’s capitalize on the need for capacity and gas generation,” Ketchum said in an interview. By partnering with GE Vernova, “we can find multi-gigawatt solutions for these customers, not just gas but combined with renewable solutions,” he said.
Ketchum also said that strategy will be helped by the Trump administration’s strong support for gas power.
NextEra shares gained as much as 5.8% in New York. The company also owns Florida Power & Light, one of the largest US utilities.
“It can’t be underestimated how much this industry has changed in a very short amount of time, really the last 15 months to 18 months,” Rebecca Kujawa, head of subsidiary NextEra Energy Resources, said on the call. “We’ve seen a lot of increase in demand for natural gas.”
GE Vernova has said data centers favor gas over intermittent renewable sources like wind because the facilities require power around the clock. Scott Strazik, GE Vernova’s CEO, said this week that orders for gas turbines more than doubled to 20 gigawatts last year and he expects 2025 to be even stronger.
NextEra has asked US regulators for a licensing change for the Duane Arnold nuclear plant, a first step toward potentially restarting the Iowa facility.
NextEra aims to get the reactor up and running again as early as the end of 2028, it said Friday in an earnings release. “This is much faster than we and investors we speak to expect,” Jefferies LLC analysts led by Julien Dumoulin-Smith said in a note.
The request was filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Thursday, according to a company representative. NextEra had previously said it was interested in reviving the plant.
NextEra is not the only company pursuing efforts to revive reactors. South Carolina utility Santee Cooper said Wednesday it’s seeking bids to restart construction of two reactors at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station. And in September, NextEra rival Constellation Energy Corp. announced plans to restart a reactor at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania to supply Microsoft Corp.
The 600-megawatt Duane Arnold plant closed in 2020 after its biggest customer decided to exit its power-purchase agreement. The facility was also damaged in a windstorm that same year, prompting the company to close the plant two months earlier than planned.
NextEra has said Duane Arnold, which went into service in 1974, uses less-complex technology that may make it easier to revive than newer nuclear plants. But Jefferies & Co. analyst Julian Dumoulin-Smith has said bringing the facility back into service would be costly and there’s no guarantee the economics would be justified.
(Updates with comment from CEO in fourth paragraph, comment from analyst in 10th paragraph.)
