Google Agrees To Help Pay For Georgia Nuclear Upgrades In Deal Utility Says Would Protect Other Customers

Google agreed to help pay for upgrades that would increase the output of Georgia’s older nuclear reactors under a deal filed with state regulators Monday.

Georgia Power, the largest electric subsidiary of Southern Company, filed the agreement with the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC), which must approve it before it takes effect, the utility said in a Monday press release.

Georgia Power projected that Google’s subscription would yield about $900 million in benefits for its customers over the life of the reactors, according to its release. The upgrades to Georgia Power’s share of Vogtle Units 1 and 2 near Waynesboro and Hatch Units 1 and 2 near Baxley would add about 96 megawatts of capacity.

The projects, called uprates, involve replacing or modifying major plant equipment so a reactor can be licensed to run at a higher power level and generate more electricity, according to the release.

Google would sign up for a new rate schedule called the Nuclear Uprate tariff and receive zero-emission credits that let it count the new nuclear generation as carbon-free, the release stated. The company would pay extra for that power, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

Georgia Power said in the release that the arrangement would help keep the additional costs of the upgrade work from falling on customers who do not take part in the program.

Private industry is increasingly helping to get more power out of the nation’s existing reactors, Jake Kincer, senior program manager for the nuclear program at ClearPath, a conservative clean energy policy group, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview.

“This is not actually even the first time this has happened,” he said, pointing to deals Meta signed with Vistra and Constellation and to Microsoft’s support for restarting the Crane Clean Energy Center, formerly Three Mile Island Unit 1, in Pennsylvania.

He noted that the Georgia agreement and the Crane restart each involve “a tech company helping to underwrite the economics of getting more out of our existing fleet.”