Google Funds Georgia Nuclear Upgrades Under New Subscription Deal — SkimNews
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- Georgia Public Service Commission approved a deal between Georgia Power and Google to upgrade four older nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle and Plant Hatch, creating a subscription program that takes effect in 2028.
- Google will pay a subscription fee on top of its electricity bill to cover the cost of the upgrades, receiving credit toward its goal of running entirely on carbon-free energy by 2030 — nuclear qualifies because it burns no fossil fuel and generates around the clock.
- The Georgia Power arrangement is projected to add 96 megawatts of nuclear capacity to the grid and deliver approximately $900 million in projected benefits to customers over the life of the upgraded units, per the utility.
- Google also announced a separate partnership with Constellation Energy to fund nuclear upgrades at reactors in Illinois, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, adding 890 megawatts to the PJM grid — the country's largest grid operator.
- Amazon separately announced its own deal to add capacity at a Constellation Energy nuclear plant in Maryland, placing two of the largest cloud companies on parallel nuclear-upgrade tracks.
- The nuclear subscription model sidesteps a bottleneck the source flags explicitly: utilities racing to meet data-center demand are leaning on new natural-gas plants, but supply-chain delays for gas turbines are forcing utilities into multi-year waits — upgrades to existing nuclear plants can be done in roughly five years, per Corporate Energy Buyers' Katie Southworth.
Why it matters: Hyperscale data-center demand is straining utilities with multi-year delays on natural-gas turbine deliveries, and this subscription model gives tech giants a way to bank carbon-free megawatt credits while ratepayers in Georgia collect roughly $900 million in projected benefits over the reactors' lives — a template PSC Commissioner Stan Wise publicly invited other utilities to copy.
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