Constellation Energy is working to restart the former Three Mile Island Unit 1 reactor in Pennsylvania, now proposed to be renamed the Christopher M. Crane Clean Energy Center, to supply power for Microsoft’s data centers. Talen Energy filed with the SEC in June 2025 to formalize its own nuclear supply deal with Amazon Web Services. Both moves reflect a scramble by utilities and tech companies to secure carbon-free electricity as AI-driven data centers place unprecedented strain on the U.S. power grid, raising real questions about whether enough generation capacity exists to keep residential customers supplied.
Why FERC disputes may slow nuclear restarts more than safety reviews
The standard assumption is that restarting a shuttered nuclear plant depends mainly on clearing safety reviews at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Constellation, for its part, must restore the plant’s licensing basis, verify component status, and complete physical upgrades before the NRC will allow the Crane Clean Energy Center to operate again. The NRC held a public meeting on Constellation’s restart plan, and agency records show the company has submitted quality-assurance program documents and code-edition requests as part of the regulatory path forward.
But a separate and less visible bottleneck sits at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The Susquehanna Nuclear case directly addresses how nuclear plants can deliver power to co-located data centers. FERC’s orders in that proceeding, including rehearing decisions, set the terms for whether a generator can bypass the regional grid to serve a single large customer. If those terms are restrictive or remain in litigation, a restarted reactor could clear every NRC safety hurdle and still face years of procedural delay before it can actually send electrons to a data center campus.
Grid-integration disputes tend to drag on because they involve competing interests: other ratepayers who fear higher costs, grid operators concerned about reliability, and state regulators with their own priorities. NRC technical reviews follow a defined timeline with established milestones. FERC proceedings, by contrast, can be extended through rehearing petitions, court appeals, and shifting policy positions from new commissioners. The Susquehanna case illustrates this dynamic. Its docket includes initial orders, rehearing orders, and an active court posture, all of which create procedural layers that no amount of engineering progress at the plant site can shortcut.
DOE data, SEC filings, and the AI power grab
The U.S. Department of Energy released a report evaluating the rising demand from data centers, drawing on analysis from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. That report treats data-center load growth as a federal policy concern, not just an industry talking point. The DOE’s resources point to detailed modeling housed at Lawrence Berkeley’s dedicated data-center research program, giving federal planners a quantitative foundation for projecting how much additional generation the country will need.
On the corporate side, Talen Energy’s June 11, 2025, press release, filed as an SEC exhibit, formalized its relationship with Amazon Web Services around nuclear energy supply. The filing does not disclose contract volumes or pricing, but the fact that Talen chose to memorialize the deal through a regulated securities disclosure signals that the financial commitment is material enough to affect the company’s market position. Separately, reporting from the Associated Press notes that the AI boom could give Three Mile Island a new commercial purpose, with Constellation’s restart plan specifically tied to supplying power for Microsoft’s data centers.
These two deals, Constellation-Microsoft and Talen-AWS, represent a pattern rather than isolated transactions. Major cloud computing companies are locking in dedicated nuclear capacity because wind and solar cannot yet guarantee the round-the-clock baseload that data centers require. For residential electricity customers, the concern is straightforward: if large blocks of nuclear generation are reserved for tech companies, less power remains available on the open grid, potentially driving up prices or tightening supply during peak demand.
Unresolved questions for grid reliability and household bills
Several gaps in the public record make it difficult to assess how quickly these nuclear restarts will deliver results. The NRC’s facility page for the Crane Clean Energy Center lists required workstreams but does not include a final safety evaluation or a projected restart date. Constellation’s public meeting slides, accessible through the NRC’s ADAMS document system, outline the licensing-basis restoration approach without providing a completion timeline. Until those milestones are set, any projected online date remains speculative.
The FERC docket for Susquehanna Nuclear is similarly incomplete from a public standpoint. The case index shows orders and rehearing posture but does not include underlying party testimony or cost-allocation filings that would reveal how grid costs might be redistributed if co-location arrangements become widespread. If FERC ultimately restricts direct nuclear-to-data-center power delivery, utilities may need to sell into the wholesale market and let data centers buy from the grid like any other customer, a structure that could ease reliability concerns but slow the commercial case for restarts.
Talen’s SEC filing records the AWS relationship but omits the contract volumes and pricing terms that would let analysts quantify how much power is being diverted from general grid supply. Without those numbers, it is hard to know whether the AWS demand will primarily displace existing wholesale customers or instead be met by incremental generation tied to efficiency gains and capacity uprates at Talen’s nuclear units. The same opacity surrounds the Constellation-Microsoft arrangement at the Crane Clean Energy Center, where neither party has publicly specified how much of the plant’s capacity will be dedicated to data-center load versus broader market sales.
For households, the risk is not just higher monthly bills but also a subtle shift in planning priorities. If utilities see more profit in long-term, bespoke contracts with tech firms, they may devote capital and management attention to those projects at the expense of distribution upgrades or demand-response programs that directly benefit residential customers. Regulators could respond by conditioning approvals for nuclear restarts and co-location deals on commitments to maintain or improve service quality for ordinary ratepayers.
Yet nuclear partnerships with data centers could also support reliability if structured carefully. Long-term revenue from a hyperscale cloud customer might make it financially feasible to restart or extend the life of reactors that would otherwise retire, preserving carbon-free baseload that supports the entire grid. In that scenario, households might benefit from more stable wholesale prices and reduced exposure to gas-market volatility, even if a portion of the nuclear output is effectively pre-sold to tech companies.
Ultimately, the balance between these risks and benefits will be decided less in engineering control rooms than in regulatory dockets. NRC staff will determine whether the Crane Clean Energy Center can operate safely, but FERC and state commissions will decide how that output is integrated into the grid and who pays for the associated transmission and reliability services. As AI-driven data centers multiply, those decisions will shape not only the viability of individual nuclear restarts but also the trajectory of residential electricity costs for years to come.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
