DOE Lends $1 Billion to Bring Crane Back for PJM's Data Center Load
The federal government is now a lender to the restart of the reactor once known as Three Mile Island Unit 1. On November 18 the Department of Energy said its Loan Programs Office had closed a $1 billion loan to Constellation Energy Generation to help finance the Crane Clean Energy Center, an 835 MW plant on the Susquehanna River in Londonderry Township, Pennsylvania. The output is already spoken for. Constellation signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft in September 2024, and the restart was the first major deal in which a hyperscaler underwrote the return of a retired nuclear unit.
It changes how quickly and cheaply the plant can be brought back, and it puts a federal stamp on the idea that data center demand in PJM is a reason to recover existing capacity rather than wait for new builds. DOE described the deal as the first project to receive a concurrent conditional commitment and financial close under the current administration. The money comes from the Energy Dominance Financing program, which the department says was created under what it calls the Working Families Tax Cut, the tax law signed in July.
On November 17 the company entered into a loan guarantee agreement with DOE and a note purchase agreement with the Federal Financing Bank, under which the bank committed $1.0 billion. DOE says the reactor ceased operations in 2019 but was never fully decommissioned. Constellation's release listed investments in the turbine, generator, main power transformer, and cooling and control systems. The plant sits next to Unit 2, which shut down after the 1979 accident and is being decommissioned by a separate owner.
The loan closes in a market that has run short of slack. In that setting, 835 MW of firm, zero-carbon output on an existing site is valuable in a way that new capacity cannot match on timing. Crane differs from the Susquehanna arrangement between Talen Energy and Amazon, which drew objections at FERC in 2024 because it was structured as co-location behind the meter.