DOE offers Vistra $4.2 billion conditional loan for reactor uprates

The US Department of Energy has committed a conditional loan of up to $4.2 billion to Vistra Corp for uprates and modernization at its Beaver Valley, Davis-Besse and Perry nuclear power plants.

The investments at Beaver Valley in Pennsylvania and Davis-Besse and Perry in Ohio will produce more electricity from existing plants without new transmission corridors or equivalent new generation resources, and support their operation for an additional 20 years beyond their existing licences, the DOE said on October 6. The projects will preserve nearly 4 GW of baseload power and add 433 MW of capacity, helping meet growing demand in Pennsylvania, Ohio and the 13-state PJM Interconnection region. They will support about 3,000 project-related jobs in engineering, construction and planned outage work.

The commitment from DOE's Office of Energy Dominance Financing includes an option to finance potential future uprates at Vistra's Comanche Peak plant in Texas. Vistra must satisfy technical, legal, environmental and financial conditions before the DOE enters definitive financing documents and funds the loan, DOE said. DOE said the investment advances Executive Order Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base.

Vistra President and CEO Jim Burke said in February that power purchase agreements with companies including Amazon Web Services and Meta supported plans to relicense and uprate the plants, with the focus on uprates likely to come after 2028. AWS signed a 20-year PPA for up to 1,200 MW from Comanche Peak; Meta signed 20-year PPAs covering 2,176 MW of nuclear energy and capacity from Perry and Davis-Besse, plus the purchase of energy from uprates at those two plants and Beaver Valley. Burke said Vistra sees an opportunity to contract up to an additional 3.2 GW across Beaver Valley and Comanche Peak, including potential upgrades of about 200 MW at Comanche Peak, whose operating licences were extended in 2024 for an additional 20 years.