DAUPHIN COUNTY, Pa. — Constellation Energy has announced its newest partnership with Microsoft exactly five years after Unit 1 was shut down for economic reasons.
It’s expected to pave the way for the Crane Clean Energy Center and restart the Unit 1 reactor which was taken offline in 2019.
“One of the reasons why Unit 1 was not viable is because we didn’t have anybody to buy the power, now we do, and it’s backed by a 20-year commitment with Microsoft to put that energy off the grid and it’s a great partnership,” said Dave Marcheskie, the community relations manager of CCEC for Constellation.
The CCEC is expected to create 3,400 direct and indirect jobs.
State Representative Tom Mehaffie (R) is excited to see jobs return to the area.
“You know a lot of people left, a lot of people found jobs in other places, but already I’m getting calls from the previous workers that were here who are excited to come back and excited to work here,” Mehaffie said.
The site is also expected to generate more than 800 megawatts of carbon-free electricity to the grid and provide billions of dollars to Pennsylvania in state and federal taxes.
“We’re going to have both contractor jobs, thousands of those, more than 600 full-time jobs once the plant is restarted and then we have to fuel every two years which brings another 2,000 jobs into the area during those refueling outages so it’s a huge economic engine,” Marcheskie said.
Constellation also announced an additional $1 million in philanthropic giving over the next five years.
But not everyone is enthusiastic.
Former chairman of TMI Alert, Eric Epstein, says the partnership will be a net loss for consumers.
“The electric is going to be taken off the grid and it’s going to go to one customer, Microsoft. Number two, these plants don’t pay for transmission and distribution costs, so we the ratepayers will pay it. And number three, the most importantly, TMI cannot compete on the market,” Epstein said.
Unit 1 sits adjacent to Unit 2 which shut down in 1979 and is in the process of being decommissioned by its owner, Energy Solutions.
TMI 2 is likely not to be cleaned up because they are restarting the plant so there’s a lot of implications to this potential restart of TMI,” Epstein said.
Constellation is hoping to have unit 1 restarted by 2028 but must first seek approval from the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
They are also expected to obtain permits from other state and local agencies.
The company stresses Unit 1 is a fully independent facility that was not impacted by Unit 2's accident.
Epstein and other anti-nuclear groups are considering litigation against the NRC and say this is the beginning of a long fight.