Constellation to get up to $5B DOE loan for planned uprates

Constellation has a conditional loan agreement of up to $5 billion in place with the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Dominance Financing to support uprate projects at eight nuclear power plants in Illinois, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, the utility and federal agency announced Tuesday.

The loans would help accelerate Constellation's slate of uprates-projects that ultimately will generate additional power from its existing fleet at a fraction of the time and cost of new reactor builds or restarts. In a separate interview with CNBC, DOE Secretary Chris Wright, on location at the Byron power plant in Illinois (one of the eight facilities in question), said these uprates would generate 1.1 GW of new nuclear capacity from 15 reactors across 8 plants.

"It's significantly more energy, puts downward pressure on rates, allows more manufacturing, more jobs to be created in the area served by these plants," Wright said.

Additional details: The eight plants selected are already undergoing or will undergo uprates:

• In Illinois-Braidwood, Byron, Clinton, Dresden, LaSalle, and Quad Cities.
• In Maryland-Calvert Cliffs.
• In Pennsylvania-Limerick.

Five of the plants are among those mentioned in an October 6 announcement in which Google entered into a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with Constellation. Calvert Cliffs, meanwhile, is the focal point of a PPA between Amazon and Constellation. Meta entered into a PPA with the utility in 2025 for power produced by Clinton, while Walmart became the first retailer to enter into a nuclear PPA when it reached a deal with Constellation to receive power from Dresden.

"This is how America wins the race for energy abundance-by pairing private-sector demand and investment with smart federal financing to unlock more power from the nuclear plants we already have," Constellation chair, president, and CEO Joe Dominguez said in a statement. "Our agreements with Google and Amazon demonstrate how long-term customer commitments can incentivize billions of dollars in investment in new, reliable nuclear capacity. This conditional loan commitment can help us move faster and go further, putting more reliable power on the grid, creating and preserving good-paying jobs, strengthening American energy security and helping families and businesses manage energy costs."

The announcement mentions the DOE's UPRISE program, an initiative to boost the power output of the country's existing fleet of reactors through uprates and restarts, as well as bringing public and private entities together to make these projects possible.

According to both Constellation and the DOE, the conditional loan agreement is subject to technical, legal, environmental, and financial conditions being met. It also includes an option for the DOE to finance future uprate projects at other Constellation facilities.

The uprates will provide enough additional power to support more than 930,000 homes and support more than 10,000 project-related jobs, the DOE said.

DOE-EDF (formerly known as the Loan Programs Office) has already committed up to $4.2 billion to another utility, Vistra, in the utility's efforts to uprate three of its power plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio.