Google's revived Iowa nuclear plant gets $1.9B US loan

NextEra Energy has received a $1.9 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Energy to refurbish an Iowa nuclear power plant that Google said last October it would help bring back online. It’s the second loan of its kind: the DOE extended a $1 billion loan to Constellation Energy last year to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island.

James Danly, Deputy Secretary of Energy, said the Iowa plant’s 2029 restart will “drive down electricity costs,” though he did not explain how. Just 50 megawatts will be set aside for the local power cooperative, NextEra CEO John Ketchum said during an earnings call last year — capacity that would cover 18% of Iowa’s demand growth since 2021, the year before ChatGPT was released. Google is reportedly looking to build up to six data centers near the Duane Arnold Energy Center, which has sat idle since 2020, when an intense rainstorm damaged it and NextEra opted to mothball it rather than repair it, at a time when cheap natural gas made nuclear economically unappealing.

That calculus has shifted. New data centers are expected to nearly triple the power sector’s electricity demand by 2035, and shuttered nuclear plants have become a favored option for utilities scrambling to add clean, firm capacity quickly. Microsoft struck a deal with Constellation two years ago to restart a Three Mile Island reactor that last ran in 2019; it’s scheduled to restart in 2028 at 835 megawatts. Meta is buying all the clean-energy attributes from Constellation’s 1.1-gigawatt Clinton Clean Energy Center in Illinois, sending the plant’s electrons to the local grid while Meta uses the certificates to offset emissions elsewhere — a deal that saved the plant from closing. Meta’s own Hyperion AI data center, for comparison, will need 10 natural gas power plants to run, consuming more electricity than all of South Dakota if completed.

Duane Arnold is smaller, but the refurbishment will squeeze an additional 14 megawatts from the facility, bringing its total to 615 megawatts. Altogether, the three revived plants represent the lowest-hanging fruit in the U.S.; a Utility Dive report suggests there may be one or two more candidates, including San Onofre in California, though those have been shuttered longer and would need more work to restart.

Why it matters

The Trump administration’s second nuclear loan in as many years signals it sees revived reactors as central to meeting AI-driven electricity demand — a bet tech companies are backing with data-center commitments years before the plants can restart.