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Holtec International in Camden, N.J. May 10, 2019. JOE LAMBERTI/COURIER POST-USA TODAY NETWORK Adrian Hedden Carlsbad Current-Argus achedden@currentargus.com
Local officials in southeast New Mexico are searching for a new path to see a nuclear facility built and operated near the border between Eddy and Lea counties, after a company planning to do so terminated the project.
In canceling its plans, New Jersey-based Holtec International pointed to a tide of opposition from state officials – despite local support in Carlsbad and Hobbs – to its proposal to store spent nuclear fuel rods brought in from power plants around the country.
Holtec first applied for a federal license for the facility in 2017, touching off a controversial licensing process that was delayed by litigation and plagued by opposition from the state administration, New Mexico’s congressional delegation and environmental advocates.
The company was recruited to the location by the Eddy Lea Energy Alliance, a consortium of local officials from the two counties and the cities of Carlsbad and Hobbs. The Alliance owns the 1,000-acre plot of land where the facility would have operated.
Company officials wrote in a July 28 letter to the Alliance that the project “was impossible” amid strong opposition from state lawmakers and current agreements in place with local leaders, stating the company was terminating an agreement to buy the land from the Alliance once the facility was operational.
Holtec spokesperson Patrick O’Brien confirmed Wednesday, Oct. 8, that the company and the Alliance agreed to part ways, allowing the Alliance to seek other companies to develop the site and Holtec to pursue projects in other states amid recent efforts by the U.S. Department of Energy to facilitate state consent.
“After discussions with our longtime partner in the HI-STORE project, the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance, and due to the untenable path forward for used fuel storage in New Mexico, we mutually agreed upon canceling the agreement,” O’Brien wrote in an email.
“This allows for (the Alliance) to work to redevelop the property in a manner that fits their needs and allows Holtec to work with other states who are amenable to used fuel storage based on the recent DOE work on public education and outreach.”
During a Wednesday, Oct. 8, meeting of the Alliance held in a Carlsbad, Chair John Heaton said the Alliance offered to dissolve a noncompete clause, which would allow Holtec to pursue other projects in Colorado and Utah, while continuing to pursue the site in New Mexico.
He said the company’s president, Krishna Singh, responded that he “would not put another penny” into New Mexico after heavy state opposition was voiced and the project delayed.
The Alliance’s board voted unanimously to accept the letter and termination of the project.
“He is just so frustrated with the constant roadblocks from the state of New Mexico,” Heaton said of Singh. “They just said they’re through. They want to cancel it.”
Supreme Court favors nuclear storage
The company appeared ready to build the facility which would hold up to 100,000 metric tons of the refuse after a U.S. Supreme Court verdict in June reinstated a federal license to build and operate the site.
Justices ruled the project’s opponents who initially challenged the license for the site had no legal standing to enter the licensing process in the first place.
That left Holtec and its supporters claiming victory and expecting the project to move forward, after more than a decade of debate, public hearings, and negotiations between the company and the Alliance.
But Senate Bill 53, passed by state lawmakers in 2023 barred any state agency from issuing permits Holtec would need to operate the site, a problem noted in Holtec’s letter along with the overall “political climate” in New Mexico.
“Unfortunately, the passage of state legislation that effectively prohibits the construction of the (consolidated interim storage facility), combined with the continued public opposition expressed by New Mexico’s current administration, has made the project impossible in the near future,” read the letter signed by William F. Gill, Holtec vice president and senior counsel.
During the Wednesday meeting, Heaton made a motion for the Alliance to accept the July 28 letter from Holtec canceling the land sale and a revenue sharing agreement. The motion was supported by a unanimous vote.
Other nuclear options considered
Heaton said the site could still be used for a nuclear project developed by a different company to either store or repurpose the spent fuel, but that such a move would require a new license application process.
“Any other entity that would want to create an interim storage facility at the site would need to go through the (Nuclear Regulatory Commission). It (the license) is not assignable,” Heaton said.
Hobbs Mayor Sam Cobb said that if Holtec officially terminates its role in the project, the Alliance must seek another company to build and bring the facility into service.
He argued that the commission, the U.S. government’s main approval arm for nuclear facilities, already approved the project federally, meaning it could be viable with another willing participant.
“I think it’s incumbent on us to explain any possible forward movement at the site which the (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) has deemed suitable,” he said. “The nuclear industry is resurging and it’s going to keep expanding.”
But Heaton countered that the project as approved involved “proprietary” technology owned by Holtec, meaning a new company would need to pay Holtec for its use or seek approval for a new design.
He said Holtec has built but not operated storage facilities in other areas and could be open to doing so for a new operator of the facility with new federal approval.
“They will still have to go through the process,” Heaton said. “That is the big barrier.”
He did say Wisconsin-based Shine Technologies might be ideal for a different project at the site in lieu of Holtec’s participation.
In February, Shine Technologies announced it was selected by the U.S. Department of Energy to receive funding through its Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program to aid in developing technology to reprocess spent nuclear fuel.
That could involve the Alliance’s site, Heaton said. He said the fuel rods initially planned to be stored at Holtec’s facility could instead be reprocessed at the location, potentially by Shine Technologies or a similar company.
“Reprocessing has much more economic benefit than storage,” Cobb said. “We probably need to put together a plan to make those presentations.”
An aerial view shows a natural gas processing plant under construction in Pennsylvania’s Washington County on Oct. 26, 2017. Credit: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
First in a series about rising electricity prices in Pennsylvania.Read the second story here.
In 2013, when the Appalachian fracking rush was still in its early days, then President Barack Obama extolled its benefits in his State of the Union address. Not only had natural gas already helped to lower America’s carbon emissions, it could protect Americans from the fluctuations of the global oil market, Obama said. And there was one more important benefit: “Nearly everyone’s energy bill is lower because of it.”
Obama’s words echoed fracking’s champions in politics, business and government, who boasted that natural gas would save Americans money—perhaps nowhere more fervently than in Pennsylvania, the epicenter of the boom.
“Having that kind of a resource and that kind of production of energy right in our own backyard does help to keep the price of natural gas down for customers and the price of electricity down too,” the former chairman of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, Terry Fitzpatrick, told television viewers in 2011. “So it’s very important to the people of Pennsylvania.”
But the savings Obama and others touted were short-lived for many Pennsylvanians, followed by punishing increases that are on track to balloon even further as forecasts for demand skyrocket in the age of AI. The result is a growing energy affordability crisis, a nightmare collision of higher utility bills, climate change and shrinking federal aid.
After state Republicans fielded “distressed calls from Pennsylvanians asking for an inquiry into rising energy prices,” the Pennsylvania House Republican Policy Committee held a hearing in 2023 to learn more about the reasons for a “dramatic increase in energy costs for residents and businesses.”
“With our immense resources, and our status as a net-energy exporter, one would think the People of PA would receive lower energy prices,” the committee wrote. “But this is not the case.”
David Callahan, then the president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry trade group for companies fracking in the Marcellus formation, said natural gas was “a solution to poverty” that is “most beneficial to lower income individuals and communities of color.” He testified that the state Department of Environmental Protection was to blame for rising prices because permitting delays held up fracking projects.
That argument didn’t address a fundamental contradiction: If Pennsylvania is producing so much more gas, why are prices going up? Why aren’t its residents benefiting more from the resource beneath their feet?
An aerial view of a fracking pad in Westmoreland County, Pa. Credit: Ted Auch/FracTracker Alliance
Impossible Choices
Natural gas production in Pennsylvania more than doubled between 2013 and 2024, and consumption rose faster than in any other state. The rise in natural gas consumption in Pennsylvania has largely been driven by electricity as coal power plants went offline. Now close to 60 percent of the state’s electricity comes from gas, far above the national average. Pennsylvania is awash in excess power, sending more electricity outside its borders than any other state and exporting, domestically and internationally, three-quarters of the gas it produces.
These shifts have not translated to lower costs for Pennsylvanians. Comparing average household electricity prices from 2010 to 2024, residents here haven’t fared better than consumers in many states with little or no natural gas production.
After a period of stability, Pennsylvania electricity rates have soared since 2020. The average household electricity bill in the state has risen 31 percent in that time, according to the Energy Information Administration, faster than the national average by six percentage points.
Some of the highest increases in Pennsylvania are in the southwest, the heart of fracking country, where residents often live in close proximity to wells and bear the heaviest health and environmental burdens caused by drilling.
Gas industry advocates say increases in the past few years are blips due to price shocks from the Ukraine war and other factors that affected the global economy, not a reason to question Pennsylvania’s resource decisions.
But the long-term record is more difficult to defend.
A review of federal electricity data since 2005—a year selected because it preceded the development of the Marcellus, the shale gas deposit under Pennsylvania—shows that the period when abundant gas contributed to stable electricity costs didn’t last long.
The state’s household electricity prices were the 14th highest in the country in 2005. In 2024, they were also 14th. Pennsylvania’s prices were above the national average in 2005 and remain so now.
Gas costs aren’t the only driver. Utilities spent significantly more on wires and other grid infrastructure that were little noticed when fuel costs were flat.
Still, the state’s dependence on a single energy source is a significant part of the story.
Twenty-four percent of Pennsylvanians struggled to pay their energy bills in 2024, according to census data, up from 19 percent in 2021, and disconnection rates are rising.
Data from utilities shows a 25 percent increase in electricity terminations between 2023 and 2024 alone.
Elected officials, activists and utility lawyers who help people with their energy bills have watched the reverberations ripple across the state. A suddenly higher bill for a person on a tight budget means impossible choices, between food and heat or between medicine and air conditioning. Terminations can lead to debt, eviction and family separations. In heat waves and cold snaps, and for people who rely on electricity to power medical equipment, they can be life-threatening.
“More and more people cannot afford to keep energy on,” said Elizabeth Marx, the executive director at the Pennsylvania Utility Law Project, a legal advocacy group that assists people with their bills.
When people can’t keep up with their utility bills, they try to make do with less electricity, she said, which often has serious consequences for their health.
“In the wintertime, I’m usually not turning on the heat because I don’t want the electric bill to go up,” said Amber Gale, a resident of Clearfield County in central Pennsylvania. “We unfortunately don’t have any air conditioning. We can’t afford to get it, but we do have some fans.” She tries to avoid turning the fans on in the summer, even as the temperature soars.
In all seasons, she constantly watches how much electricity she uses, trying to avoid spikes in her bills.
The Pennsylvania Gas Discount
For almost 20 years, the gas industry sold fracking to Pennsylvanians as a revolutionary economic engine that would bring jobs, infrastructure investment, energy security, tax revenue for local governments—and lower energy bills.
“Abundant natural gas in the Marcellus not only means lower heating bills for families and small businesses, but lower electricity rates as well, as they are tied to prices for natural gas,” a 2011 fact sheet from the Marcellus Shale Coalition said. In the early 2010s, the industry paid for economic studies carried out by researchers at Penn State University that estimated that Pennsylvanians had already saved millions of dollars in energy bills because of fracking, $27.7 million on electricity alone.
“Electricity prices for all Pennsylvanians are down nearly 40 percent since the onset of the shale gas revolution, thanks to the increased use of natural gas for electric generation,” David Spigelmyer, then the coalition’s president, wrote in 2016.
In 2017, the University of Pennsylvania released a study reflecting on more than 10 years of shale gas development. As things stood then, the fracking revolution had delivered a “clear win for consumers” in Pennsylvania, said Christina Simeone, the researcher who authored the study and now works for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Simeone’s study showed a “Pennsylvania Gas Discount” from fracking that lowered gas and electricity commodity prices, though residential consumers were still paying more than national averages. From 2007 t0 2016, consumers in the state experienced fewer service terminations and less energy debt.
But Simeone warned that the discount could disappear, especially as companies exported more gas out of state. “It is also important to understand that erosion of the PA Gas Discount has the potential to also increase electric power prices,” she wrote.
Her prediction was prescient. Earlier in the fracking boom, lack of pipeline infrastructure meant that the gas was essentially stranded in the state, sold at lower prices than would be available elsewhere.
Today, with additional infrastructure in place, the local cost benefit has been undercut by the state’s role as a major supplier to much of the country and abroad.
This is a boon for companies that produce gas, but it does little for the state’s consumers.
“Pennsylvanians are competing for their own gas with other countries that are willing to pay a lot of money for it,” said Marx, with the Pennsylvania Utility Law Project. “There’s no requirement, like, ’You shall provide this amount of gas to the people whose backyards it’s pumped out of,’ right? If you have people willing to pay more to ship it out of state, as long as the infrastructure exists to ship it out of state, you’re going to ship it out of state.”
Because Pennsylvania’s electricity grid is now so reliant on natural gas, when gas prices spike, utility bills go up, too. More service disconnections follow. Marx said there is a “direct line” between rising gas prices and more people losing access to heating and cooling in their homes.
These factors are magnified as the country enters a period in which electricity demand is rising to serve the growth of data centers and AI. Rising demand for electricity contributes to rising prices for gas, which is Pennsylvania’s and the country’s leading fuel for power plants.
“People Are Struggling”
Before Elizabeth Marx specialized in utility law, she was an attorney at the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence. In that role, she handled a case where custody was transferred to an abusive parent because the other parent had lost electricity service.
“The judge thought it was safer for that child to be with the batterer than it was to be in a home without electricity,” she said. That case gave her insight into the unexpected ways that energy precarity can unravel lives, compromising safety, housing, health, education and stability.
Marx’s work is deeply personal for her. When she was a child, she and her mother and siblings escaped from domestic violence, leading to a period of upheaval. After leaving a shelter, the family lived in a 19th century farmhouse with nearly original windows and extremely high costs for heating.
“It’s not an academic exercise for me,” she said. “I lived poverty.” She and her family experienced energy insecurity, though it didn’t have a name then.
Today, she’s increasingly alarmed by the situation in her home state. She has a bird’s-eye view via the Pennsylvania Utility Law Project’s emergency hotline for people seeking help with their utility bills. These days, the calls are coming from across the state, Marx said.
“You’d find energy insecurity everywhere you go. There’s certainly high concentrations in Philadelphia, and increasingly high concentrations in Pittsburgh. But we’ve got clients in Saltsburg, Pennsylvania, and Erie, Pennsylvania, and everywhere in between,” Marx said. That’s why promising Pennsylvanians lower energy prices was a winning political strategy in the 2024 election: “It resonates with people, because there’s not a single person that’s going to tell you their energy prices haven’t gone up.”
Between 2006 and 2025, western Pennsylvania’s Duquesne Light Co. and West Penn Power, and Penelec in northern and central Pennsylvania all increased rates more than 110 percent, according to an annual rate survey from the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission that started in 2006. Met-Ed, in the southeast, increased rates 95 percent. These increases far outpaced the rate of inflation in this period. (The percentages are based on comparisons of the total electricity bill for households using 500 kilowatt-hours per month.)
“In my office, we see so many people, young people living in their first apartments, seniors who are on fixed incomes, parents with really hungry kids who are holding their breath when they get their electric bill every month, because it could be a big shock,” state Rep. Mandy Steele, a Democrat representing an area just north of Pittsburgh, said during a virtual discussion in April about rising electricity costs.
Jessica Shirley, secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection, shared her own experience in that meeting of opening a bill in the dead of the prior winter. “I was like, ’We’re just gonna be cold, guys.’”
For Amber Gale, who moved from Pittsburgh to Clearfield County in 2020, increases have meant shortchanging her budget for food and clothing and going without heat whenever possible. “When we first moved, our average electric bill was anywhere from $50 to $60. Now, this past winter, it was about $120 to $170,” she said. She still can’t figure out why the bill for her small apartment, which uses electric heat, is so high.
Gale has experienced what it’s like to survive without electricity at home: walking to the library to charge her phone, going to the laundromat to wash clothes, relying on friends or family for other essential needs. She fears that increasing utility bills will land her in the same situation again.
“Not being able to afford anything, having our electricity turned off right now, getting sick and dying from the heat: That’s what I’m really worried about,” said Gale, who has diabetes, one of many chronic conditions exacerbated by high temperatures. “I’ve never been able to handle the heat well, so it makes me really sick.” There are no cooling centers close to where she lives and few options for public transportation.
In Braddock, a steel town south of Pittsburgh, seniors on fixed incomes are struggling the most with utility bills, said Chardaé Jones, the former mayor of Braddock and a regional organizer for the Pennsylvania Policy Center. “There’s only so far that they can stretch their budget,” she said. “It’s not like they’re using more electricity. They’re just getting charged more.” Braddock is served by Duquesne Light.
When intense storms tore through the Pittsburgh region in April, an example of extreme weather increasing as the climate changes, people in Braddock were left without power for days. Duquesne and other Pennsylvania utilities have increased investment in infrastructure updates, in part to contend with the climate-fueled storms that the state’s natural-gas use contributes to, but data shows little or even no improvement in several indicators of grid reliability.
As climate change fuels more frequent heat waves and extreme weather events, and prices are likely to keep rising, summers in Pennsylvania will be increasingly dangerous.
“I’m worried about seniors. I’m worried about newborns. I’m worried about medically vulnerable households not being able to keep their homes at adequate temperatures in the summer,” said Joline Price at Community Legal Services, a nonprofit that provides legal help to low-income Philadelphia residents. “The only thing we’re going to see with increasing prices is increasing shut-off notices.”
She’s watched the number of Philadelphia households needing help with their utility bills rise for the past five years.
“The assistance that’s available has been going down,” added Price, a divisional supervising attorney specializing in energy. “People are struggling.”
Philadelphia’s aging housing stock, higher levels of poverty, urban heat islands and warmer climate compared to the rest of the state mean that the city is particularly vulnerable. “I’m concerned about not being able to pay for my electric,” said Carol Foy, a Philadelphian who tries to keep her usage down, a difficult task. Her husband needs electricity to power a medical machine for his heart, she said.
Like Gale, she worries about what the future will bring. She’s seen what can happen when someone is unable to get help with their utility bills. “I had a friend that passed away like 10 to 15 years ago, because she didn’t want to turn on her heat. She froze to death because she was scared that she couldn’t afford to pay her electric bill,” Foy said.
Cuts to federal funding that used to be a lifeline for people like Gale and Foy are making a bad situation worse. Earlier this year, the Trump administration laid off the entire staff overseeing the national Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps Americans with heating and cooling costs. The program provided aid to hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians every year, keeping families out of debt and their power and heat turned on.
In Pennsylvania, the funding had also been used to pay for air conditioners for residents, one possible avenue of help for Gale now potentially closed off, though even before staff was cut, need far exceeded supply. The Trump administration has proposed eliminating funding for the energy assistance program entirely, though so far Congress has rejected this proposal.
“There’s no help,” Gale said. “Anytime you try to get help or ask someone or call a government agency, they just tell you to call another one, and then they tell you to call another one.”
The Resource “Right in Our Backyard”
Inside Climate News asked the Marcellus Shale Coalition and the companies that own the state’s largest electricity utilities the same question: How do they explain the recent price surge?
Patrick Henderson, vice president of government affairs and communication for the coalition, took issue with using the rates people pay—retail electricity prices—to assess what’s happening because customers’ bills have many costs beyond fuel.
“I’d find the nearest window, open it and throw out comparisons of retail prices,” he said.
He prefers to use figures that separate the regulated portion of the retail price, which mainly includes delivery charges, and the unregulated portion, which includes the electricity supply and is closely tied to the price of gas.
The Public Utility Commission’s rate survey makes it easy to analyze changes to different parts of the bill over time. Looking at the survey from 2006 to 2016, the regulated and unrelated parts of the bill for most Pennsylvania utilities was close to a 50-50 split.
From 2017 to 2022, the ratio shifted to roughly a 55-45 split, regulated charges exceeding the unregulated ones. Delivery charges grew while gas prices were close to flat.
From 2023 to 2025, a substantial growth in the unregulated charges as gas prices rose helped return bills to about a 50-50 split.
But this attempt to summarize the pricing belies some big differences between utilities. For example, Duquesne Light has been an outlier for much of the last decade in having a large share of its overall bill taken up by regulated delivery charges and a small share—as low as 31 percent in 2021—taken up by unregulated charges.
Henderson listed several factors that he thinks should be part of the conversation about rising electricity rates.
First, he points to the Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard, a state requirement that utilities get a certain percentage of their electricity from solar, wind, hydropower and natural gas captured from coal mines and landfills, along with other qualifying sources. Utilities spent $702 million complying with the law in 2024, which gets passed on to customers. This was equivalent to 3.9 percent of Pennsylvania consumers’ total spending on electricity that year.
Second, he said the 2019 proposal for Pennsylvania to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, has led power plant owners and others in the electricity market to shift their spending in ways that lead to higher costs. So far, the state has not joined the carbon-trading initiative due to legal challenges, and it’s difficult to distinguish between investments companies might have made in anticipation of RGGI membership and decisions that would have happened anyway.
Henderson’s third point is that increases in gas prices in the last few years were tied to global events such as the Ukraine war, and some of the more recent increases reflect rising electricity demand to serve data centers and other large users.
While acknowledging that the price increases have happened, Henderson thinks shale gas producers deserve credit for the years of stable prices.
Prices would “be a hell of a lot higher if they weren’t being mitigated by a cheap, abundant resource right in our backyard,” he added.
Consumer and environmental advocates strongly disagree with Henderson’s points about the alternative energy standard and RGGI. They note that some of these arguments may have currency when talking to elected officials or people affiliated with the oil and gas industry, but they are off base as part of any serious attempt to explain the major factors behind the state’s pricing trends.
How could RGGI be driving price increases when it has not become policy in Pennsylvania? “Utilities are creatures of stability,” said Marx. “They don’t respond to potentials.”
The problem, she said, is that the oil and gas industry is exaggerating the effects of small factors, such as the alternative energy standard, while downplaying huge factors, such as the harm of relying so heavily on one fuel.
“The most recent jump that we have seen post-pandemic is nearly entirely driven by the gas export market,” she said. “I would point to the substantial increase in LNG exports that have Pennsylvanians competing in the world market for gas the way they do for oil.”
Pennsylvania’s utility companies explained rate increases as largely driven by the need to make investments in equipment to improve reliability, along with increases in the market price of gas.
“PECO’s rate trend remained relatively stable for many years, with more noticeable changes beginning in 2021,” said Candice Womer, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia-area utility. “These adjustments reflect the company’s ongoing commitment to strengthening the energy grid, enhancing service reliability, and supporting the region’s transition to cleaner energy.”
Other utilities had similar comments. For example, Matt Neistein, director of communications for Duquesne Light, said recent rate increases are because the company is “investing in the replacement and modernization of our grid infrastructure.”
Todd Meyers, a spokesman for the four FirstEnergy utilities in Pennsylvania, said the company’s customers pay rates comparable to those of other investor-owned utilities in the state. He said any differences can largely be explained by contrasts in population density and topography. “Some have large rural territories while others have a more urban footprint, with each requiring different electrical equipment, infrastructure and staffing levels,” he said.
Some of the people who predicted the current affordability crisis are incredulous about what they see as weak excuses from the companies that have benefited.
“What has happened over the last 20 to 25 years is that these utilities have essentially boiled the frog,” said Patrick Cicero, who was head of the Pennsylvania Office of Consumer Advocate until January. “They’ve had increases over increases over increases.”
He had a reputation for being an aggressive defender of utility consumers’ interests. Now he is working on the legal staff at the Pennsylvania Utility Law Project, alongside Marx.
The low price of natural gas in the late 2010s, he said, meant that utilities could increase their delivery charges without having much of an effect on overall bills.
Then delivery charges kept going up as gas prices spiked in the last few years.
Cicero doesn’t blame gas companies for trying to increase demand for their product and he doesn’t blame utilities for proposing rate increases. He places most of the blame on the Public Utility Commission for not being skeptical enough of utilities’ spending.
“Utilities are acting in their rational self interest all the time, and it is a shame that our system has not held them more accountable,” he said.
When asked for an explanation for rising rates, the commission said that it only has oversight for part of the electricity bill, and that the process for setting the regulated portion of rates is transparent.
“We do not set or control generation prices,” said Nils Hagen-Frederiksen, the Public Utility Commission’s press secretary, in an email. “Those are based on wholesale market forces and supplier pricing decisions. However, we understand consumer frustration when energy costs rise, regardless of the cause.”
Asked if the Marcellus is a net benefit to electricity ratepayers, he said this:
“The advent of Marcellus Shale production in Pennsylvania, beginning in the late 2000s, contributed to a lengthy period of relatively low and stable energy prices. But market dynamics have changed dramatically over the past several years, leading to increasing and more volatile energy prices.”
Energy Dependence
When Obama gave an important speech on American energy policy in March 2011, the “enormous” potential of natural gas played a starring role. The U.S. needed to reduce its reliance on foreign oil, Obama said, to protect consumers from “being a victim to shifts in the oil market.” Natural gas could help ensure America’s security and prosperity, he said.
Obama’s vision for American energy independence has not come to pass. The rise in natural gas exports is creating the same challenges for consumers that he had hoped to avoid by weaning the country off oil imports.
President Donald Trump wants to accelerate that trend: He has made expanding liquified natural gas exports a priority of his second administration. One of Trump’s first acts in his second term as president was to end a pause on additional export terminal permits that was put in place under President Joe Biden. The Marcellus Shale Coalition has supported Trump’s LNG policy; its then-president said in December that LNG exports “promote jobs” and “deliver energy savings for consumers.”
“The facts are clear: expanding America’s LNG exports is good for Americans and good for the world,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in May.
Although the Trump administration has said that providing affordable energy for Americans is a priority, the president’s emphasis on increasing LNG exports is likely to have the opposite effect, experts warn.
Pennsylvania could pay as much as $16 billion in additional costs between 2035 and 2050 because of higher natural gas prices if proposed LNG export projects move forward, according to a November report from Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization.
“Trump doesn’t seem to realize that the more LNG you export, the higher people’s home energy bills are going to be. The more we export, the more we expose ourselves to these wild swings in the market,” said Alan Zibel, research director at Public Citizen. “The Trump administration has pretty clearly sold out the future of rural communities in Pennsylvania.”
Over the past 20 years, Pennsylvania has locked itself into a future where its fate is tied to the volatilities of the global price of natural gas, and the people paying the highest price are the same ones that fracking companies promised to help.
After months spent trying to find government resources to assist with paying her climbing energy bills, Gale sees community support as the only real option for help, and she encourages people to look out for each other when they can.
But she acknowledged there were limits. She had realized recently that she was not alone in navigating this new, more expensive reality.
“It’s not just me. It’s everyone,” she said. “Everybody’s struggling.”
The Duane Arnold nuclear power plant in Palo, Iowa, in 2018. Google and NextEra Energy on Oct. 27, 2025, announced a plan to bring the shuttered facility back online by 2029.
Dive Brief:
Google and NextEra Energy will collaborate to restart the 600-MW Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa as part of a larger partnership aimed at accelerating nuclear deployment across the U.S., the two companies said Monday.
On Friday, Santee Cooper revealed it has signed a letter of intent regarding the potential sale of two unfinished reactors at the abandoned V.C. Summer project in South Carolina to Brookfield Asset Management. The 2.2-GW project was mothballed in 2017 following delays and cost overruns.
The reexamination of retired or canceled nuclear projects comes as the U.S. is desperate for power resources to support artificial intelligence and other demand centers. New resources may have some market advantages over existing generators, and the recent deals are a “positive” for the sector, according to equity analysts at Jefferies.
While the DOE’s action is broadly seen as designed to speed the interconnection of AI and data center loads, Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith said the market may have overlooked the proposed rule’s recommendation that existing generators co-locating with new loads 20 MW or higher be required to undertake a reliability review.
“The generator could not serve new load until necessary transmission upgrades are completed, at the generators expense,” Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a Monday note about the DOE letter and new nuclear deals. “We see the letter as all but ensuring the market will prefer front-of-the meter deployments, with preferential treatment clearly emphasized for those bringing new supply.”
In South Carolina, Jefferies sees Brookfield going “all-in on new nuclear.” It said “Brookfield’s participation in nuclear is bullish for new nuclear companies broadly.”
Proposed in 2008, the V.C. Summer expansion was supposed to cost less than $12 billion. Owners SCANA and Santee Cooper abandoned the project in 2017 after concluding that completing construction would take years and costs could spiral to $25 billion.
However, Santee Cooper has maintained equipment at the site over the past eight years, utility president and CEO Jimmy Staton said in a statement.
“The state of the units, and the fact that they use the same Westinghouse AP1000 technology that is now operating in Georgia and overseas, make these assets very attractive to the nuclear power industry,” Staton said.
Santee Cooper launched a competitive bidding process in January. It received initial expressions of interest from over 70 potential bidders and 15 formal proposals. The letter of intent with Brookfield establishes a six-week initial project feasibility period during which the parties will select a project manager and evaluate construction providers to resume construction of the two nuclear units.
“The six weeks also would allow for advanced discussions with entities interested in buying nuclear power generated by the units and facilitate additional due diligence, leading to execution of a Memorandum of Understanding,” Santee Cooper said.
In Iowa, Google and NextEra say they expect Duane Arnold to be back online in early 2029.
“Restarting a once fully operational plant is the fastest path to unlock large-scale nuclear power to meet AI growth in the near-term,” the internet giant said in a news release.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in August approved a waiver request that will allow NextEra to restart the facility. NextEra shuttered the plant in 2020 because of challenging economic conditions.
“Our partnership with Google not only brings nuclear energy back to Iowa — it also accelerates the development of next-generation nuclear technology,” NextEra Chairman and President John Ketchum said in a statement.
Demand growth from data centers, industry and electrification is driving a utilities to reconsider older generating facilities. The Palisades plant in Covert Township, Michigan, in August became the first decommissioned U.S. nuclear plant to officially transition to “operations” status
The Trump administration has secured one of the most ambitious nuclear energy deals in American history, leveraging an $80 billion commitment funded through a massive trade agreement with Japan to dramatically reshape the nation’s power infrastructure. The groundbreaking partnership with Westinghouse and its owners, Brookfield Asset Management and Cameco Corporation, represents a bold strategy to quadruple U.S. nuclear capacity by 2050.
The complex arrangement emerged from months of negotiations between Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Brookfield executives, culminating in a signing ceremony that coincided with Trump‘s first meeting with Japan’s new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. The deal demonstrates how the administration is using international trade relationships to secure critical energy infrastructure investments that support domestic strategic objectives.
Japanese funding provides massive financial foundation
The nuclear reactor investment draws from a staggering $550 billion trade agreement between Washington and Tokyo, with Japan’s economy ministry earmarking up to $100 billion specifically for U.S. government spending on Westinghouse reactors. This arrangement allows America to pursue aggressive nuclear expansion without straining federal budgets, while providing Japan with strategic energy partnership benefits.
The involvement of Japanese funding reflects Trump‘s broader approach to trade negotiations, where critical supply agreements for power and mining assets become integral components of international deals. This strategy positions nuclear energy development as both a domestic priority and an element of international economic diplomacy.
Eight advanced reactors anchor expansion plans
The $80 billion investment will fund approximately eight Westinghouse AP1000 power plants, according to Brookfield projections, though the final configuration may include a mixture of larger traditional facilities and smaller modular reactors. These advanced AP1000 units represent proven nuclear technology designed with enhanced safety features and improved operational efficiency compared to older reactor designs.
Westinghouse executives emphasize that the AP1000 reactor design offers replicable, scalable technology that can be deployed more efficiently than previous nuclear projects. This standardized approach aims to avoid the costly delays and budget overruns that have plagued recent American nuclear construction efforts.
Government secures significant ownership potential
The partnership includes unprecedented profit-sharing mechanisms that could eventually provide the federal government with substantial equity stakes in Westinghouse. Under the agreement’s structure, Washington would gain rights to 20 percent of company profits once current owners receive $17.5 billion in distributions.
Additionally, the government can require Westinghouse to pursue public listing if company valuations exceed $30 billion by 2029, potentially converting profit-sharing arrangements into direct equity ownership of up to 20 percent. These provisions recognize the government’s role in accelerating long-term value creation through financial, regulatory, policy, and diplomatic support.
Federal support extends beyond financial investment
Washington’s commitment encompasses more than monetary contributions, with the government pledging assistance in securing land acquisitions and regulatory permissions for reactor construction. Federal involvement may include loan guarantees and support for Westinghouse’s international business development efforts.
This comprehensive support structure addresses historical challenges that have deterred private nuclear investment, particularly concerns about regulatory delays and construction risks. The government’s willingness to provide multifaceted assistance signals serious commitment to nuclear expansion goals.
Strategic timing coincides with Asian diplomacy
The deal’s announcement timing proved significant, with Brookfield CEO Bruce Flatt joining Trump’s delegation to Japan for the signing ceremony. This high-level coordination demonstrates how nuclear energy policy has become integrated with broader international trade strategies and diplomatic initiatives.
The arrangement also positions nuclear cooperation as a foundation for Trump’s upcoming trade discussions with China, potentially providing leverage in negotiations over critical energy infrastructure and technology transfer agreements.
Industry recovery from previous setbacks
The partnership comes as Westinghouse works to rebuild credibility following its 2017 Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, which resulted from massive cost overruns at Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear plant. The most recent American nuclear project exceeded its original $14 billion budget by more than double and faced years of construction delays.
However, company officials express confidence that lessons learned from previous challenges have improved their ability to deliver projects on schedule and within budget parameters. The standardized AP1000 design represents their strategy for achieving more predictable construction outcomes.
Ambitious capacity targets drive urgency
Trump has directed the nuclear industry to fast-track both large and small reactor development to reach 400 gigawatts of total capacity by 2050. This target represents a fourfold increase from current levels and would position nuclear power as a dominant component of American electricity generation.
Holtec's extremely high-risk "zombie" reactor restart is now being overseen by a zombified safety regulator. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) safety regulation, never robust, has been in absolute free fall. Now the federal government shutdown means even less NRC oversight and enforcement, as Holtec races at breakneck speed to restart the 60-year old (designed in the mid-1960s), severely age-degraded atomic reactor. Holtec's dangerous rush seems to be driven by its Initial Public Offering, announced for early 2026, where it hopes to raise $10 billion. (Holtec has long maintained it would restart Palisades by the end of 2025 at the latest, but Bloomberg has just reported the reactor will not resume operations until early next year.)
The consequences of Holtec's race to the cliff edge, and NRC's dangerously diminished regulatory oversight, have become quite clearly evident, made manifest by major management failures. A Holtec Palisades worker falling into the flooded reactor cavity during refueling operations on October 21, 2025 garnered widespread media coverage. However, additional recent incidents at Palisades have yet to receive much, if any, media coverage whatsoever. These include a leak of toxic chemicals into Lake Michigan, as well as empty alcohol bottles found in Palisades' critical reactor-related "protected area." The glaring lack of oversight and poor Quality Assurance raise red flags for potentially worse risks to come once Holtec actually restarts Palisades.
A U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) incident report dated October 22, 2025 stated: "On October 22, 2025, at 0452 EDT, chemistry determined that a report to the State of Michigan, Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, would be required based on exceeding the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit limit for hydrazine. This exceedance did not exceed any NRC regulations or reporting criteria...There was no impact on the health and safety of the public or plant personnel. (Emphasis added)
The incident report's wording is peculiar and misleading. The exceedance did exceed National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) limits for hydrazine discharges into Lake Michigan, as the NRC incident report itself also stated, violating State of Michigan regulations, and requiring a notification to relevant state agencies.
"Holtec and the State of Michigan seem to regard the Great Lakes as a radioactive wastewater and toxic chemical industrial sewer, rather than the sacred source of drinking water, and so much more, for more than 40 million people in eight U.S. states, two Canadian provinces, and a very large number of Indigenous Nations," said Kevin Kamps, Kalamazoo, Michigan-based radioactive waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear. "As Indigenous Water Protectors from the Dakotas to the Great Lakes proclaim, 'Water Is Life.' Holtec's Palisades restart is an existential threat to 21% of the entire planet's vital surface fresh water supply," Kamps added.
Beyond Nuclear's board of directors president emerita, Kay Drey in St. Louis, Missouri, published a pamphlet about the harm to human health caused by intentional, permitted "routine releases" of hazardous radioactivity and toxic chemicals, even during "normal operations" at nuclear power plants. (The pamphlet includes a photo of Palisades' wastewater discharge pathway.) Unintentional leaks and spills make matters worse.
"As Dr. Rosalie Bertell of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health warned decades ago in her book No Immediate Danger?: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth, it's irresonsible and misleading for the incident report to claim that '[t]here was no impact on the health and safety of the public.' What about the latency period for hydrazine-caused cancer? What about the future negative health consequences for area residents who ingest carcinogenic hydrazine in their drinking water, or the fish they eat?" asked Kamps.
Yet another NRC incident report dated October 26, 2025 stated: FITNESS FOR DUTY (FFD) EVENT..."On 10/25/25, at approximately 1230 EDT, 3 empty alcohol bottles were found in the protected area by a contract employee. Site security was notified and took possession of the empty bottles which were removed from the protected area. The individual who accidentally brought in the empty alcohol bottles with other non-alcoholic empty bottles was tested for FFD and was negative... (Emphasis added)
"This Fitness for Duty incident report is confusing, begging more questions than it answers. Regarding the individual who brought the three empty alcohol bottles into the protected area, what are their safety responsibilities? How and why did the individual 'accidentally' bring empty alcohol bottles, and other non-alcohol empty bottles, into the protected area? Where and by whom was the alcohol consumed? Was it consumed by others in the protected area, who were then not tested for Fitness for Duty? As Holtec races to restart Palisades, is there a substance abuse problem amongst its workers in charge of vital safety jobs?" Kamps asked.
"These most recent Event Reports have an underlying root cause of poor Quality Assurance and a lack of oversight by Holtec at Palisades. The poor Quality Assurance at Palisades is endemic and baked in, soon to be pronounced as equipment fails. Holtec has placed production over safety with a multitude of requests for relief as they gallop to calamity," stated Michael J. Keegan, researcher with Don't Waste Michigan.
"A wide variety of incident reports have been issued about the Palisades atomic reactor since construction began in 1967, and since operations began in 1971, until Entergy made the wise decision to close it for good on May 20, 2022, due to yet another reported incident -- the latest in 50 years of safety-crtiical control rod drive mechansim seal leaks, yet another potential pathway to reactor core meltdown. Palisades has long been nicknamed 'The Monster on the Beach' by some of its nearest neighbors. These major management failures by Holtec and NRC beg the question, does Dr. Frankenstein even know what mischief his monster is getting into?" Kamps asked.
"Perhaps most monstrously, the move by NRC's Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards to strike the Palisades steam generator discussion from the agenda of its last major meeting before the restart decision deprives the public of open scientific and engineering discussion to ensure there is no major radiological accident at Palisades. Credible nuclear engineers, including our expert witness Arnie Gundersen, have warned that there are high odds of a disaster which would be worsened by the lack of working, proven emergency arrangements. The hallmark of a Zombie Palisades restart is this sense of a relentless lurching forward where the corporation and the NRC pointedly ignore authoritative warnings of a real-time horror show," said Terry Lodge, Toledo, Ohio-based attorney for the environmental coalition opposing the reactor restart.
A one-stop-shop of Beyond Nuclear web posts about Palisades, arranged chronologically backwards from the present to April 2022, can be found here. That was the month Holtec's CEO Krishna Singh first floated "Small Modular Reactor" construction at Palisades, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer first floated the zombie reactor restart scheme, breaking the promise to decommission Palisades instead.
'It was an accident' Holtec says after worker falls into reactor cavity at Palisades
Michigan's Occupational Safety and Health Administration has launched an investigation after a worker fell into a reactor cavity at the Palisades Nuclear Plant.
Forget about the froth in tech valuations. The real excess might be building up in energy stocks.
For all the fears about stretched technology shares, many of those companies are hugely profitable ones that will keep chugging along even if the artificial-intelligence boom doesn’t have legs. Not so in the energy sector. A group of non-revenue-generating energy companies have collectively ballooned in value to more than $45 billion in hopes that tech companies will one day pay for their yet-to-be-built power.
The biggest of these is the OpenAI CEO Sam Altman-backed nuclear startup Oklo, whose shares have risen about eightfold year to date. The company now has a market cap of roughly $26 billion, making it the biggest U.S.-incorporated public company that generated no revenue in the past 12 months, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Oklo is developing small modular nuclear reactors that use a non-water coolant—liquid metal sodium—and an enriched type of uranium fuel that is in limited supply. It doesn’t yet have a license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission or binding contracts with power purchasers. Wall Street analysts don’t expect the company to generate substantial revenue until 2028.
Another zero-revenue company is Fermi, which was valued at roughly $19 billion upon its public debut earlier this month. Only two other no-revenue companies had larger market caps than Fermi on their first day of trading after an IPO, adjusted for inflation, according to Jay Ritter, finance professor at the University of Florida. These are EV-maker Rivian, which went public in 2021, and Corvis, an optical network equipment maker that went public during the dot-com bubble.
The company is backed by former energy secretary Rick Perry and helmed by Toby Neugebauer, the former chief executive of the failed anti-woke bank startup GloriFi. It has plans to build out 11 gigawatts worth of power for data centers, roughly the amount of capacity in New Mexico. Though its shares haven’t sustained their initial pop after listing, the company still commands a market capitalization of over $17 billion. That isn’t too far from the valuation of Talen Energy, a company that already owns an operating power fleet of about 11GW.
Fermi plans to meet that 11GW target using natural gas, nuclear, solar and battery power. It has a way to go: So far, it has secured natural-gas equipment that would cover just 5% of its total capacity goal. The company hasn’t lined up any binding customer contracts.
Companies developing even smaller “micro-modular” nuclear reactors are also commanding hefty market caps despite their lack of revenue. Shares of Nano Nuclear Energy, which made its debut on the public markets last year, have more than doubled so far this year. The company is valued at more than $2 billion. Terra Innovatum, which went public last week through a SPAC merger, is valued at over $1 billion.
Chain Reaction
Others swept up in the AI excitement generate revenue but aren’t expected to turn a profit for many years. Such companies include nuclear small modular reactors company NuScale Power, which earns some engineering and licensing fees for an SMR project in Romania. Its shares have surged 155% so far this year. Hydrogen fuel-cell company Plug Power’s shares, which had been in the gutter for many years, surged 90% this year to $4.8 billion on AI excitement. Neither company is expected to turn a profit until 2030, according to Wall Street analysts polled by FactSet.
One reason investors are piling into more speculative energy companies could be because profit-generating ones already command lofty multiples. Fuel-cell company Bloom Energy’s shares have rallied more than 400% year to date and are now valued at 133 times forward earnings. The company added about $5.4 billion in market cap on Monday after Brookfield Asset Management said it would invest up to $5 billion to deploy Bloom’s technology. Nuclear-fuel company Centrus Energy is valued at 99 times forward earnings.
Arguably, more commercial interest might be just what was needed to help expensive or unproven technologies take off. But based on the track record of zero or minimal revenue EV startups that went public in 2020, (remember Nikola, Fisker and Lordstown?), it is likely that many such companies will fizzle rather than pop.
If the AI bubble ever deflates, these energy companies with no revenue have the farthest to fall and little in the way of a cushion.
Eager to find new energy sources to power artificial intelligence, big tech companies are betting on nuclear – even though there are still huge questions over public perception, cost and, perhaps most importantly, the time it will take for a potential new nuclear technology to become viable.
For many Americans, dropping "Three Mile Island" into conversation is like mentioning "Fukushima" or "Chernobyl" – places that have become synonymous with nuclear disaster, no explanation needed.
The actual history is more complicated.
In March 1979, one of two reactors at the Three Mile Island plant in central Pennsylvania partially melted down, in what is to this day the most serious nuclear accident in US history.
But it resulted in just a small fraction of the damage caused by those disasters in Japan and the Soviet Union. There were no fatalities and few if any long-term health effects (scientific studies have drawn slightly different conclusions on that point).
The whole thing would likely have been a much smaller news story had it not been for a film released only a few days before.
The China Syndrome was a thriller starring Jane Fonda as an intrepid reporter investigating safety problems at a nuclear plant. It was a work of fiction, not a documentary, but the parallels with Three Mile Island damaged the reputation of US nuclear power for years.
The plant was recently in the news again – not for an accident or a hit movie, but by a deal signed by tech giant Microsoft to buy energy from Three Mile Island’s remaining functioning reactor.
And it's just part of a larger trend. Silicon Valley is on the hunt for new sources of power to drive enormous data centres and in particular, the high-power chips that have become the backbone of the artificial intelligence (AI) industry.
Nuclear could help meet that challenge in two respects – it's a potential source of "always on" energy, and unlike fossil fuels, it's carbon-free.
Big tech is making a big bet on nuclear – Microsoft has even recently joined the industry's lobbying group, the World Nuclear Association.
China has one operational small reactor. Others including Linglong are planned or under construction (Credit: Luo Yunfei/ China News Service/ VCG via Getty Images)
The maker of the Xbox is not alone. Google, Amazon and others are also funding nuclear projects, albeit taking a different tack with a newer technology known as small modular reactors (SMRs).
SMRs run at cooler temperatures, theoretically reducing the risk of a meltdown, and their smaller size also means lower construction costs.
Two such small reactors already provide a relatively small amount of power to electricity grids, one each in China and Russia's far east. So in some respects, SMRs sound like the perfect solution to the growing energy AI demand – if only it were that simple.
"Most SMRs are on paper" and haven't progressed beyond the testing stage, says Allison Macfarlane, the former chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and now a professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada.
Commercialising the technology will be difficult, Macfarlane says, because a smaller reactor core also means a less efficient reactor – producing less energy from the same amount of fuel. She estimates SMRs are years away from being financially viable.
"You just can’t get around economies of scale," she says. "These are fun ideas. But the tech bros don’t seem to be grounded in reality."
Undaunted, energy companies and tech giants are ploughing resources into research and pilots.
A tourist postcard celebrates the long history of the nuclear industry in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (Credit: Jim Heimann Collection/ Getty Images)
Kairos Power, Google's partner, is hoping to generate 50 megawatts of nuclear power by 2030 – equivalent to the amount of energy needed to power a small town.
The company has set up shop in Oak Ridge, Tennessee – another noteworthy American nuclear site, one that provided crucial support to the Manhattan Project which produced the first atomic bomb.
Kairos calls Oak Ridge a "proving ground" and in a statement to the BBC said that advanced construction techniques will increase efficiency and lower costs.
But even though the company aims to boost energy generation tenfold by 2035, practically it still won't help meet the supercharged energy demands of AI – which is ramping up right now.
"Small modular reactors can provide 24/7 clean energy near data centres," says Haider Raza, an expert in AI and energy use at the University of Essex. "But they won’t come close to solving the coming demand issue in the next year or two."
A report released in April by the International Energy Agency noted that the power demand from data centres, which currently account for around 1.5% of the world's electricity consumption, could double in the next five years. Beyond that, there's huge uncertainty – both in the amount of future demand and what sources might rise to meet it.
Nuclear reactors, Raza and other experts say, may have a role in meeting the AI energy crunch, but only years into the future – and only if the industry can convince an often-sceptical public.
The Three Mile Island meltdown affected the reputation of nuclear energy in the US for decades (Credit: Keystone/ Hulton Archive/ Getty Images)
In March, the small suburb of North Tonawanda, halfway between Niagara Falls and the rust-belt city of Buffalo in Western New York state, took what to outsiders looked like a fairly drastic step – banning nuclear power generation within its borders.
The law was a direct reaction to anger over a proposal floated by a local tech company to build a small reactor for cryptocurrency mining. Deb Gondek, a local activist who prior to retirement had worked as director of sustainability for a food company based in the area, said that many residents were wary of the proposal because they'd already been upset by the noise of the crypto mining operation.
"The initial reaction was 'Oh brother, what are they cooking up now?'," she says. The council vote was unanimous in favour of a ban.
And then there's the issue of what to do with radioactive waste. Researchers at Stanford found that SMRs actually produce more such waste than larger conventional reactors, because more subatomic particles escape from a smaller nuclear core, contaminating surrounding materials.
However, in some places, the possible benefits balance out the risks. Kairos, the company that has partnered with Google, touts its local support in Tennessee, and a recent study by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that a slight majority of Americans are in favour of more nuclear energy.
At the same time, there are researchers working on other ways out of the upward demand spiral – ones that don't require a hunt for huge new sources of energy.
Small generators such as this one are receiving a lot of attention even though most have not yet reached the commercial stage (Credit: John Keeble/ Getty Images)
Mosharaf Chowdhury, an associate professor at the University of Michigan notes that AI is growing much faster than previous energy-intensive technologies. Automobiles and computers, for instance, took decades to achieve mass adoption.
"AI has got to saturation point in not even 15 months," he says. "It just grew so fast, we didn't have a second to imagine how to account for it."
Chowdhury and his colleagues are looking at the ways that chips can be configured to suck up less power, or use AI models that rely on smaller or more focused databases of information.
Unfortunately, Chowdhury says, so far "there is no good solution where we have managed to find models that are significantly smaller and run significantly faster but accuracy-wise are just as good."
Still, he insists: "Whatever else is going on, what we should continue to do is more research on how to make energy-optimal AI."
And many businesses are taking a hard look at how they use AI applications and whether they can actually afford them.
"There's no way around the economics," says Haider Raza from the University of Essex, who consults with businesses about their AI use. "When the demand is high, and the supply is low, the only option is to increase the price (of energy), and somebody has to pay for it."
Raza says some of his customers have decided to hold off on AI for the time being – and notes that nuclear will be only one of many sources powering the future of technology.
And for all their big bets on splitting the atom, the tech giants agree. In a recent policy brief, Microsoft noted: "There is no one technology or solution that will meet the vast electricity and decarbonization needs of the markets, societies, and communities across the globe."
