The Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing issued a conditional loan up to $4.2 billion to provide uprates at several of Vistra Corp’s nuclear power plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said this week.
The announcement came during Wright’s visit to the Vistra’s Perry Nuclear Plant on Monday afternoon. According to DOE’s Monday press release, the projects will include plant modernization and a collective uprate of 433 megawatts across Vistra’s operating fleet in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Vistra’s plants that are expected to receive these investments will be Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Station near Shippington, Penn., Davis-Besse near Oak Harbor, Ohio and Perry in Perry, Ohio. Additionally, DOE will provide Vistra with the option for a conditional loan commitment for its Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant in Glen Rose, Texas.
This conditional DOE loan allocated for uprates builds upon Vistra’s 20-year power purchase agreement with Meta that was signed in January. Meta agreed to purchase 2,176 megawatts from Vistra’s Perry and Davis-Besse plants to power its data centers. It also intends to purchase an additional 433 megawatts from Vistra’s Perry and Davis-Besse in Ohio and Beaver Valley plant in Pennsylvania, with that power coming online at a later date.
DOE said these projects will help maintain nearly 4,000 megawatts of the operating fleet and will support 3,000 jobs through engineering, construction and planned outage work. The conditional loan will also financially support the company to receive 20-year operating license renewals for the plants, DOE said.
DOE said these projects “will deliver more reliable American energy, strengthen the grid, lower costs, and meet growing power demand across the 13-state PJM Interconnection, L.L.C. (PJM) region.” PJM is a regional organization that oversees the grid for parts of 13 states, including Ohio and Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia.
Vistra must satisfy several technical, legal, environmental and financial requirements prior to entering into definitive paperwork for the conditional loan, DOE said.
“President [Donald] Trump promised to unleash an American nuclear renaissance, and the Energy Department is delivering,” Wright said in the release. “By getting more power out of the nuclear plants we already have, we can deliver more affordable, reliable, around the-clock energy for American families and businesses.”
Beaver Valley is a dual-unit plant comprising two pressurized water reactors with a generating capacity of 1,700 megawatts to 1,900 megawatts of electricity. Davis-Besse is a single pressurized water reactor plant that generates around 900 megawatts of electricity. Perry is a single boiling water reactor plant that generates around 1,270 megawatts of electricity.
Vistra, based in Irving, Texas, obtained these three nuclear power plants in its completed acquisition of Energy Harbor in early 2024.
In March, DOE unveiled a new program, Utility Power Reactor Incremental Scaling Effort (UPRISE), that intends to bring additional power to the grid at existing plants through uprates. Under the UPRISE program, DOE wants to bring an additional 2,500 megawatts of nuclear energy onto the grid by 2027 and 5,000 by 2029.
The program is supported by DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy and Office of Energy Dominance Financing. DOE said its financing office is capable of providing up to 80% of the funding for these near-term uprate projects.
