Dive Brief:
- Google entered an agreement with Kairos Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal government owned public utilities provider, to help power the tech conglomerate’s operations and growing data centers with zero-emissions energy, the companies announced Monday.
- Under the agreement, the Tennessee Valley Authority signed a power purchase agreement and will become the first U.S. utility to buy power from an advanced fourth-generation nuclear reactor, according to the release. Google will receive clean energy attributes to power its data centers in the region, according to a company blog.
- The deal is the first to come from a prior agreement between Google and Kairos to bring 500 megawatts of new nuclear power generation online by 2035. Kairos said in the release that “to accelerate the delivery of clean energy to Google,” the planned Hermes 2 Plant’s output will be expanded from 28MW to 50MW and is scheduled to come online in 2030.
Dive Insight:
As data center energy demands associated with artificial intelligence adoption increase, tech giants like Google have started to turn to nuclear energy as a potential part of the solution. Google joined Amazon, Meta and other “large energy users” in pledging to triple global nuclear energy capacity by 2050 at S&P Global’s CERAWeek conference earlier this year, and nuclear energy received relatively favorable treatment in the recent Congressional Republican budget law, according to a Crux analysis.
The nuclear attributes purchased from the TVA will go towards decarbonizing Google’s data centers in Tennessee and Alabama serviced by the utility. Google Global Head of Data Center Energy Amanda Peterson Corio said in Monday’s release that the agreement “will accelerate the deployment of innovative nuclear technologies … while also bringing firm carbon-free energy to the electricity system.”
“To power the future, we need to grow the availability of smart, firm energy sources,” Peterson Corio said. “Lessons from the development and operation of the Hermes 2 plant will help drive down the cost of future reactors, improving the economics of clean firm power generation."
Google and Kairos Power made a long-term agreement for future deployments of small modular nuclear reactors in October. This deal represents the initial phase of work, defined at the time as working “to bring Kairos Power’s first SMR online quickly and safely by 2030.”
Kairos Power CEO Mike Laufer said in the release that Monday’s deal “is an important enabler to making advanced nuclear energy commercially competitive.”
Earlier this year, Google signed an agreement with independent power producer Elementl Power to help pre-position sites for three 600MW advanced nuclear reactors, retaining the option for commercial power offtakes once the they’re complete.
Other global tech giants Microsoft, Meta and Amazon have also each announced nuclear power purchase agreements of their own in the past year.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in the release that deploying advanced nuclear reactors “is essential to U.S. AI dominance and energy leadership,” and the Department of Energy “will continue to help accelerate the next American nuclear renaissance."
