Meta announced three new deals with nuclear power companies last week, claiming they add up to a massive amount of “clean” energy to power its AI data centers: 6,600 megawatts (MW), equal to six of the new reactors that recently came online in Georgia. Meta claims it will be receiving all of that power from a combination of existing and new nuclear power plants by 2035. In conjunction with another deal Meta announced with Constellation Energy a few months ago, Meta now has agreements with nuclear companies totaling nearly 7,800 MW, of which nearly half 3,300 MW could be under contract by mid 2027.
That sounds like a lot, but scratch the surface and there’s not much there. Take, for instance, the Constellation deal. The 1,140 MW Clinton Nuclear Power Plant goes into effect in June 2027. Why June 2027? Because a 10-year Illinois state subsidy program expires in May 2027, under which Clinton has been receiving over $90 million per year from electricity customers, in the form of zero-emissions credits (ZECs) the state’s two largest utilities are required to purchase from Constellation. These state-regulated, non-tradeable instruments are going away in May. Meta’s contract with Constellation is not to buy the electricity from Clinton, which Constellation sells on the wholesale market. Rather, it is to pay Constellation for “ZECs” after the state-regulated program expires.
That is to say, Meta’s deal with Constellation is not to provide power to Meta’s data centers. Meta will still be buying power off the grid for its AI data centers in addition to Constellation’s ZECs. It is only buying certificates from Constellation in order to claim Meta is buying the “greenness” of the electricity Clinton generates through a private, unregulated transaction. But the electricity Meta will be using is, in reality, no greener than the rest of the electricity on the grid. In fact, the large increases in demand that Meta’s AI data centers are contributing to is largely being provided by fossil fuel power plants, increasing emissions and making the grid dirtier.
That brings us to Meta’s announcements of three new deals with nuclear power corporations on January 9:
- A 20-year contract with Vistra to buy up to 2,600 MW from four reactors in Ohio and Pennsylvania;
- Up to 1,200 GW from the nuclear startup company Oklo; and
- Up to 2,760 MW of nuclear capacity and 1,200 MW of storage capacity from another nuclear startup company, Terrapower.
For further background:
Meta inks trio of nuclear deals to support AI ambitions
The Oklo agreement is the smallest of the three, though the only one that has immediate impact is with Vistra, to buy power from Davis-Besse and Perry (2,176 MW), as well as power from 433 MW of planned power uprates at D-B, Perry, and Beaver Valley:
Meta and Vistra’s deal is a 20-year power purchase agreement that will provide Meta with over 2,600 megawatts of nuclear energy from three of Vistra’s nuclear power plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The deal includes agreements for 2,176 MW of operational generation, along with 433 MW of power output increases.
As detailed in Vistra’s press release, though, it appears this is more like the deal between Constellation and Meta involving the Clinton reactor. That is really a subsidized greenwashing deal, under which Meta is buying “ZECs” from Clinton (i.e., not the actual power) after the Illinois ZEC program expires in May 2027.
From Vistra’s release:
- Meta is purchasing 2,176 MW of nuclear energy and capacity from the operating Perry and Davis-Besse plants in Ohio;
- Meta is also purchasing 433 MW of incremental nuclear energy and capacity from equipment upgrades to increase generation output (called uprates) at the Perry (Ohio), Davis-Besse (Ohio), and Beaver Valley (Pennsylvania) plants … ;
- the electricity generated at the plants will continue to go to the grid for all electricity users.
… Meta’s purchases under the agreements will begin in late 2026, with additional capacity added to the grid through 2034, when the full 2,609 MW of power will be online.
It’s not at all clear what Vistra means by “purchasing … capacity” since Vistra sells capacity from its power plants in the PJM capacity market auction, which has been extraordinarily lucrative in recent years because of the AI data center expansion. But putting “nuclear energy and capacity” together with the third bullet that says all of the electricity will go on the grid, that suggests Meta is basically buying the equivalent of the fake ZECs it plans to buy from Clinton, as a greenwashing instrument. That means, Meta is really just buying power off the grid and getting Vistra’s and Constellation’s permission to claim it is all “clean” electricity by paying them a subsidy on the side.
In order for this scheme to have any credibility under the Clinton deal, Constellation and Meta have to wait until June 2027, after the official, Illinois-regulated ZEC program expires. However, the deal with Vistra is under no such constraint. The creation of a ZEC-like program was the major feature of a law enacted in Ohio in 2019 (HB 6) through a $60 million corruption scheme, but it never went into effect. After federal prosecutors indicted legislators and lobbyists in 2020 and exposed the corruption involved in enacting HB 6, the legislature repealed the nuclear subsidy provisions. Vistra and Meta are free to initiate their greenwashing contract right away. And since there are no actual emissions standards in Ohio that Meta has to comply with, they are free to engage in fake schemes like this to put a green label on their data centers without any laws being broken.