The Dominion Energy headquarters is pictured on July 6, 2020 in Richmond, Virginia.
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Dominion Energy is exploring the possibility of connecting a data center directly to a nuclear plant in Connecticut, as the tech sector hunts for carbon-free electricity to power artificial intelligence applications.
The Millstone Power Station in Waterford, Connecticut provides more than 90% of the Nutmeg State’s carbon-free power and generates enough electricity for nearly 2 million homes annually, according to Dominion.
“We’re certainly open to the idea of a co-located data center,” Dominion CEO Robert Blue told analysts on the company’s second-quarter earnings call Thursday when asked about Millstone.
“We continue to explore that option,” Blue said. “We do clearly realize any co-location option is going to have to make sense for us, our potential counterparty and stakeholders in Connecticut.”
Some 55% of Millstone’s output is spoken for under a fixed-price contract through late 2029, Blue said. Dominion is “actively working with multiple parties to find the best value for Millstone” when the current power purchase agreement expires, the CEO said.
Surging demand
Power demand from data centers is surging as tech companies build larger and larger facilities to support increased use of artificial intelligence.
The demand from individual data centers has soared from 30 megawatts historically to as much as several gigawatts today, Blue said on Dominion’s first-quarter earnings call in May. A gigawatt of power is equivalent to the capacity of an average nuclear reactor in the U.S.
Dominion is the eighth largest company in the S&P 500 Utility Index by market value. The utility, headquartered in Richmond, serves northern Virginia, the world’s largest data center market. Dominion has connected nine new data centers so far this year with plans for a total of 15 by the end 2024.
Blue said Thursday that data center “growth is accelerating in orders of magnitude driven by the number of requests, the size of each facility and the acceleration of each facility’s ramp scheduled to reach full capacity.”
The tech sector has shown growing interest in nuclear as a source of reliable, carbon-free power for data centers. Amazon Web Services bought a data center powered by a Talen Energy nuclear plant in Pennsylvania for $650 million in March. AWS is also in talks with Constellation Energy for electricity supplied by a nuclear plant on the East Coast, according to a Wall Street Journal report in July.