As Constellation’s vice president of data economy strategy, Mike Kramer is connecting data center demand to nuclear energy supply.
Mike Kramer has always liked puzzles. But in 2017 he faced one harder than any sudoku. This one involved the livelihoods of hundreds of American families.
As director of business operations and the chief financial officer for Exelon Corporation’s eastern region, Mike Kramer was accountable for the financial health of seven nuclear generation facilities across four states. And things were not looking good.
The trend lines for nuclear power had been heading down. In much of the country, renewables had reached grid parity and cheap natural gas was edging out nuclear power. He couldn’t make the math work at one of the reactors Exelon had operated for nearly 50 years – Three Mile Island Unit One. So in September 2019, it shut down.
But last fall, things started turning around. Exelon spin-out Constellation, where Mike is now VP of data economy strategy, is restarting the plant as the Crane Clean Energy Center. And things are looking up at Constellation’s nuclear plant in Clinton, Illinois, which it is relicensing to operate for another 20 years.
This week on With Great Power, Mike shares his take on the nuclear energy renaissance, what it’s been like to go from decommissioning to recommissioning a plant, and what growing demand for emissions-free power means for Constellation’s nuclear fleet across the country.
With Great Power is a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios.
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Credits: Hosted by Brad Langley. Produced by Mary Catherine O’Connor. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. The GridX production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and Brad Langley.
Brad Langley: For most of us, the words Three Mile Island don't invoke thoughts of innovation and growth.
Mike Kramer: I think a lot of people think about Three Mile Island and they go back to what happened in 1979 on the unit that we never owned or operated.
News clip: A government official said that a breakdown in an atomic power plant in Pennsylvania today is probably the worst nuclear reactor accident to date.
Brad Langley: To this day, the Three Mile Island meltdown remains the worst nuclear accident in US history.
News clip: Two water pumps that help cool reactor number two shut down. Officials say some 50 to 60,000 gallons of radioactive water escaped into the reactor building.
Brad Langley: But Mike Kramer says the accident actually brought about some positive change.
Mike Kramer: One of the things that came out of that incident was an industry that was focused on operational excellence and safety culture.
Brad Langley: It's a culture Mike helped develop for almost two decades at Exelon. So when the company announced in 2017 that it was closing Three Mile Island Reactor One after nearly 45 years of operation, Mike wasn't happy, but he also knew the business model just didn't work anymore.
Mike Kramer: I was responsible for our east nuclear fleet's financial operations. One of the challenges about thinking through how you continue to operate the plant is you're making 10, 20 year investment decisions to ensure you're operating at a high reliability factor. It was not an issue where it ran poorly or that people didn't want to keep operating the plant. It was one of our best facilities.
Brad Langley: But in the late 2010s, the US energy market was changing.
Mike Kramer: You had really low natural gas prices, you had a lot of new renewables on the system and we just couldn't make the math work.
Brad Langley: So on September 30th, 2019, Exelon closed the plant. It was obviously a tough day for everyone.
Mike Kramer: A lot of employees were going to lose their jobs. It was very impactful to me personally, and I think a lot of the people that worked there.
Brad Langley: And of course the community that had grown up around the plant for decades took a big hit.
Mike Kramer: That's one of the biggest impacts—these towns just get decimated when they don't have the economic activity that the plants were providing. The schools, the municipalities all get a good amount of their funding from the property taxes that are paid by the facility. All the things that the town survives on largely came from the plant.
Brad Langley: In the years that followed the closing, the community around the plant changed. Some businesses shuttered, some residents moved away. But then in 2022, Mike had a conversation that changed everything.
Mike Kramer: Joe Dominguez, our CEO, came to me and said, "I really want to figure out a way in which we can do this. How do we make the math work?"
Brad Langley: Joe Dominguez was the CEO of Constellation, a clean energy offshoot of Exelon. Mike had joined Constellation as director of strategic finance and valuation when the company formed in 2022. And that thing Constellation's CEO came to him wanting to make work was reopening Three Mile Island Reactor One.
Mike Kramer: It was not an easy challenge. There wasn't a lot of difference from where we were in terms of the base economics in 2019 versus the beginning of 2022. But what had changed is the political support.
Brad Langley: That support was coming from both sides of the aisle and it came with resources.
Mike Kramer: There was the Civil Nuclear Credit Program that was on the books. Was that a possibility? Shortly after that, the Inflation Reduction Act passed, and so that gave us some potential tax incentives to think through how that would work for operating the plant.
Brad Langley: And then came the rise of AI and power-hungry data centers. As big tech leaned into AI, companies needed to expand their energy portfolios to meet that growing demand.
News clip: A new deal could pave the way for reopening Three Mile Island in Dauphin County. Constellation Energy owns TMI and today it just announced the signing of a 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft.
Mike Kramer: We announced the restart five years to the day of the shutdown. That was a really neat moment in time, walking through the plant and seeing the systems that were shut down before and starting to figure out the inspection schedule and working through the timelines on all those things. It was just a really impressive switch.
Brad Langley: Mike's role has changed too. He's now vice president of Data Economy Strategy, which means he's focused on opportunities around powering those data centers.
Mike Kramer: Trying to understand what it means for the energy industry and our business in general, to support coordination of that deal flow and to basically be the subject matter expert for a variety of different organizational inputs as we think about load growth and the potential for what that means in different regions.
Brad Langley: Constellation announced the reopening of Three Mile Island's reactor one in September of 2024, and this summer they celebrated it with a big rally.
Mike Kramer: Governor Shapiro was there, Bobby Hollis from Microsoft was there, and you saw generations of folks who had worked at the plant—parents and siblings—and just the amount of excitement of people being able to say, "I used to work here and now I'm coming back and I'm going to be part of this." 835 megawatts of 24/7 clean, reliable energy is not something you can do in a lot of other places.
Brad Langley: This is With Great Power, a show about the people building the future grid today. I'm Brad Langley. Some people say utilities are slow to change, that they don't innovate fast enough. And while it might not always seem like the most cutting-edge industry, there are lots of really smart people working really hard to make the grid cleaner, more reliable and customer-centric.
Today my guest is Mike Kramer, vice president of data economy strategy for Constellation. We talk about how Constellation is progressing towards restarting Three Mile Island—now called the Crane Clean Energy Center—and we discuss Constellation's other 20-year nuclear power purchase agreement with Meta. We also talk about the role the company wants to play in the nuclear power renaissance in the US. But first I asked Mike to walk me through Constellation's generation capacity nationwide.
Mike Kramer: Yeah, we have about 32,500 or so megawatts. About two-thirds, a little bit more than that, is nuclear. So we're the largest nuclear generator in the country and we produce about 10% of the nation's carbon-free electricity, so very heavy into carbon-free inclusive of the nuclear, but we also have wind, solar, hydro as part of that additional, call it 10,000 megawatts. We do have some natural gas facilities and then we are in the process of acquiring Calpine—Calpine is a large gas generator that also has a big geothermal facility, some battery storage and some other types of generation. So a good mix in terms of the portfolio, geographic distribution across a number of different regions. And that helps us when we think about how we power these data companies because we can put together different levels of portfolio solutions and combine different types of technologies. Most of the existing fleet was built in the seventies and eighties, so it's a mix of sites that are 40 years old, 50 years old. There are some that are approaching their 60-year life.
Brad Langley: And so two big announcements over the past year—one about Crane Clean Energy Center in Pennsylvania and one at your nuclear facility in Clinton, Illinois. Walk us through those announcements. What do they entail?
Mike Kramer: Our former CEO Chris Crane. He passed away not too long ago. Um, Chris was a fierce advocate for our business and for the industry, and so we wanted to make sure that we could honor his legacy. And combine that with what we think is really a rebirth of the industry, a symbol, symbolic moment, uh, of the nuclear Renaissance and, and name the new plant after them. So that, that's the driver of why Three Mile and to the Crane Clean Energy Center. And what that deal was was a restart of the facility and a 20-year offtake agreement where we're responsible for all the restart costs and then the data company will take the offtake for 20 years. So a very interesting deal—first-of-a-kind type transaction gives us that revenue certainty to make the investments needed to restart the plant, gets us that long-term contract to run Crane Clean Energy Center.
The Clinton transaction is one we announced back in June. It's also a 20-year offtake. And the interesting thing about that one is Clinton's license expires in 2027, and so this allows us to relicense the facility, make those investments that we need to run that plant safely and reliably for another 20 years. It also adds 30 megawatts of what we call uprates, and uprates are where you get more additional generation out of the existing units, adding some new generation to the system. Both of those agreements—the Crane Clean Energy Center and the Clinton deal—are front-of-the-meter PPAs where the power flows onto the grid and the power is settled financially with those offtakers.
Brad Langley: You mentioned the term nuclear finance a couple of times. Maybe for those that don't know, what is nuclear finance and what role is nuclear finance playing in these efforts?
Mike Kramer: So nuclear finance is the organization that manages the financial activities at these plants, and that can include budgeting, forecasting, normal accounting processes like closing the books on a monthly basis, capital investment decisions, a variety of different, I'd say advisory services for the plant operators, trying to make sure we understand where we spend our money and prioritize the investments that we're making. In addition to that, kind of at a fleet level, we do a lot of work on asset valuations on M&A-type transactions. And then more recently it's also included looking at new nuclear and what types of assumptions you're making in models for new nuclear. And so the finance elements around understanding not just the construction elements, but then the operational elements of those different facilities has some inputs from the nuclear finance organization.
Brad Langley: And a lot of the focus goes to Microsoft and Meta and those PPAs, but how else do these announcements impact Constellation and the local economies and the labor market in those areas as well?
Mike Kramer: I think the two things that I would highlight for that—the first is making sure you keep the units around for an extended period of time or, in the case of Crane Clean Energy Center, bring it back, gives you a certainty that you'll have that reliable generation on the grid for 20 years, and that helps with reliability. It helps with those economic impacts as it relates to the jobs and the refuel activities and the contracts that come with those things—the local economies, etc., all benefit from that. I'd say the second thing it does is it provides a blueprint for how I think this plays out. And one of the things that's important is with the emergence of the data economy, customers thinking through how do we make sure we relicense more of the existing nuclear fleet? And so figuring out ways in which you take that fleet that has a lot of licenses that are expiring in the next five to 20 years and extend those lives.
The second thing is trying to figure out ways in which we can add more generation. You can do that with extending the existing, with renewing those licenses, but if the demand comes at the magnitudes that some think it will, you're going to need some new generation. And so we've done that with the restart of Crane—that's 835 megawatts. The Clinton deal is an additional 30. We've talked about having another gigawatt or so of uprates in the pipeline. And so if you can add two gigawatts of new generation between the restarts and the uprates, that's two large AP1000s—big facilities that are coming on. And then the last thing that I think is important too is we haven't talked a lot about new build for nuclear, but in order to build new, you really want to leverage your existing assets. They provide local communities that support new nuclear, existing infrastructure and land that is effectively great locations. And then you also add in some synergies associated with educated and staffed workforce. I think if you don't have the existing in a good position with those licenses renewed, with that revenue certainty, it makes the new question a lot harder. And so we're trying to figure out ways in which we can manage putting those things together because I think it's really important to ensure you achieve all the objectives you're looking for.
Brad Langley: So Mike, I think you've touched on it, but maybe at a high level—there's obviously a lot happening in terms of nuclear energy innovation and investment with new types of smaller, more nimble reactors. What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of restarts versus new builds?
Mike Kramer: Yeah, so the advantage of a restart is you have exactly what you need to operate that facility. And so it's a much simpler effort as it relates to the technical difficulties. When you get into new build, you have a couple of additional challenges. You have licensing, which is a different effort for different types of technologies. Some of those plants have not gotten their license from the NRC—it requires a couple years typically to go through that effort. You have the construction challenges—they can take a lot of time. They can provide additional challenges in terms of cost certainty because you don't know if you're going to have the labor or have the long-lead parts or if you run into tariffs or other things. And so it's really a combination of operational certainty from a risk perspective and then cost certainty are two of the biggest drivers. And then we know how long it takes to restart a reactor. Building a new unit first-of-a-kind is something that a lot of people don't know. They're working through that process. They're trying to get better at it. We've obviously gotten the ones down in Georgia built, so we know that those took a lot longer than they expected. And we're hopeful that the next round of AP1000s, when they get built, will take a lot less time than that.
Brad Langley: And your timeline for reopening—you're back up and running in 2027. Can you talk us through some of the key milestones you've reached thus far toward that goal?
Mike Kramer: Yeah, so we originally announced publicly 2028 back when we put out the announcement in September of last year. And then recently in June of this year, we announced that we're pulling that up to 2027. So as it relates to those milestones, we're making pretty good headway in all those key areas to make sure that we could start the plant sooner and get those megawatts onto the system as quickly as possible. Those key milestones, the way I think about them, are in a couple different buckets. The first is the staffing and training requirements. So we had destaffed the facility, so now we have to hire a bunch more people, get them all trained up. That is going very well. We have over 400 people that we've hired ready to work at that facility. And then the training classes for operators and other things are in flight.
The second is procure the long-lead equipment. So that has been already accomplished as it relates to the procurement. The third would be the NRC process, and we have a pretty good roadmap for that. And we've gotten all indications from the NRC in terms of our plan that we've already submitted to them that we're on track for that. And then the last one is the interconnection process. And so interconnection goes through PJM—we have to get those rights. PJM provided a process called the Reliability Resource Initiative where they're able to do studies in a faster manner to ensure that the new generation can come on and meet the needs of the increasing load that we're seeing. And Crane was part of that Reliability Resource Initiative, which helped us pull up that date from '28 to '27.
Brad Langley: And what would you say are the hardest parts of restarting a shuttered nuclear plant?
Mike Kramer: That's a good question. I think it's getting all those people back. We have a huge advantage because a lot of those people had gone to our other facilities and wanted to come back to the site. I think that having that revenue certainty for 20 years and knowing that that plant's going to be around is a great recruiting tool. Being part of a first-time, big-moment effort is something that draws a lot of interested younger folks and engineers who want to get back into the nuclear industry space. So we haven't seen a lot of those challenges, Brad. It's one that I think we anticipated being difficult, but the amount of momentum, the interest in being part of what is a huge accomplishment, I think has drawn people to that site.
Brad Langley: You mentioned that people are really clamoring to come back and work at this new center. There's a lot of pride in it. What do you think drives that pride of people just wanting to come back so much and be part of this?
Mike Kramer: I'm sure it helps that there's been good performance by the company and you're seeing our name in a lot of the headlines for some of these big transactions and for a lot of the things we can do to support the data economy. But in general, I think it's a very strong culture that supports employee engagement and gets people excited to work here. I'd say the second thing is, as it relates to nuclear in particular, it is a special moment. I think you see bipartisan support across the industry. That's not something you see in a lot of other places. Very few things that our politicians appear to be able to agree on. I think one of those is how important nuclear is to meet this moment. And then I think there's a local element too. You hear people say, "My grandfather worked at the facility, my father worked at the facility." It becomes a legacy thing.
Brad Langley: If we look at the Crane and Clinton announcements in relation to overall demand growth that Constellation is seeing, how significant are their contributions going to be?
Mike Kramer: I think the way to think about it is it's just a starting point. We think that there's plenty of AI demand and data centers getting built in our service territories. And so the real question becomes how do you best power those things? Trying to figure out the best solutions for each customer is a very important thing that we're working on. So that can be a combination of a license renewal for a plant, that can be an uprate for a plant, that can be a mix of different types of generation sources. And so I think it's really important to think through, as this continues to morph on us, how do we make sure that we're best positioned for those different solutions? And I think one of those is thinking ahead and getting those investments in place so that we have the ability to add and uprate. For example, we want customer support for those things, but we need to make sure that they're well positioned to get that uprate in the next couple years. So making some of those investments in advance is one of the things that we've been looking at. Trying to figure out how we pair those things together is important.
Brad Langley: Can you dig into a little bit what you mean by uprate? I know you're looking to perform uprate projects across the fleet, so maybe talk us through what uprating means for those that don't know and then explain what impact that would have.
Mike Kramer: Yeah, it's a good question and probably one that can get pretty technical. I'll try and keep it high-level. The way to think about it is that reactors are designed for a certain amount of output, and then over time—we talked about how these plants are 30, 40, 50, 60 years old—there's been maintenance modifications to them. You've changed out a turbine or you've changed the way in which it's designed to run one of the systems, and that can change your power output. The way the uprates are categorized—there's really three different types. One is what's called an extended power uprate. Those are generally larger, big capital-intensive projects where you're replacing a lot of significant components to get more megawatts. And those are your bigger ones that are over a hundred megawatts typically. Some plants, like I said, have already done those. There are others that haven't. And so looking at how you do that at a couple of your facilities as part of a program.
There's what's called measurement uncertainty recapture. This is a largely engineering-based exercise to figure out how much the plant can operate at different operating conditions to get more megawatts.
And then the last one is what they would call efficiency upgrades. And that is just changing out certain components of the equipment that are impeding the amount of generation you can get. So if there's a constraint because your high-pressure turbine is too small, if you were to change out that high-pressure turbine, maybe you can get a small amount—10 megawatts or 15 megawatts—of additional thermal generation out the door.
Brad Langley: And beyond Crane and Clinton, Constellation is looking to extend the licenses of other nuclear plants. Which ones and why those particular ones?
Mike Kramer: I think it's important that we continue to think of these assets as long-term in nature. So our goal would be to re-license the whole fleet. The challenge is there's a lot of uncertainty out there—we don't know what's going to happen past the PTC, which currently is set to expire in 2032. And so trying to figure out what the long-term view of these assets looks like is a big part of the effort to understand what you're going through with the relicensing. We have a number of assets that have license lives that are set to expire at the end of this decade, and then others that are going into the 2030s and even into the 2040s. But we're looking at all of them as options for potential renewals because I think we're going to need the clean, reliable energy. And certainly making the investments required on the existing assets to extend those lives is likely to be more cost-efficient than to build new.
Brad Langley: We call the show With Great Power, which is a nod to the energy industry. It's also a famous Spider-Man quote: "With great power comes great responsibility." So I'm curious what superpower you see yourself bringing to the energy transition. And if the answer is the power to harness nuclear energy, that would be a true superpower, but I'm curious to get your response to that. So what superpower do you bring to the energy transition?
Mike Kramer: Yeah, I didn't think about the power to harness nuclear energy. That would certainly have been a better answer than what I would've come up with. I think a lot of what we're dealing with is a special kind of puzzle. There are a lot of moving pieces on the supply side. There are a lot of moving pieces on the demand side. There's a lot of misinformation out there. And so one of the things that I've been very focused on in this role is trying to wade through all of that and put these disparate pieces together and figure out the way to make these power solutions work for our customers. So I think that's the way I think about adding value to this world that we're living in.
Brad Langley: Well, Mike, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for your time.
Mike Kramer: Thanks, Brad. Appreciate it.
Brad Langley: Mike Kramer is the vice president of Data Economy Strategy for Constellation. With Great Power is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. Delivering on the clean energy future is complex. GridX exists to simplify the journey. GridX is the enterprise rate platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future. We design and implement emerging rate structures and we increase consumer investment in clean energy all while managing the complex billing needs of a distributed grid.
Mary Catherine O'Connor produced the show. Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. Sean Marquand composed the original theme song and mixed the show. The GridX production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and me, Brad Langley. If this show is providing value for you—and we really hope it is—we'd love it if you could help us spread the word. You can rate and review us on Apple or Spotify, or you can share a link with a friend, colleague, or the energy nerd in your life. As always, thanks for listening. I'm Brad Langley.