Nuclear buzz: Regulators and rare bees stonewall Meta and AWS AI ambitions

Amazon’s problems are more mundane: the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) rejected an application to draw additional power from the Susquehanna, Penn. nuclear facility to operate the adjacent Cumulus data center it acquired in March from Talen Energy for $650 million and planned to expand.

The application from grid operator PJM Interconnection and the plant, which is majority owned by Talen, had requested permission to up the power to the co-located data center from the current 300MW to 480MW.

Co-located facilities connect directly to the power plant, bypassing the transmission grid, and regulators said that PJM had not provided sufficient justification for the amendment to the interconnection service agreement (ISA) allowing the increased power. FERC held a technical conference on Nov. 1 to discuss the co-location issue in the face of concerns about having adequate power to feed the grid when co-located facilities were slurping up vast amounts of electricity. There were worries that the transmission grid doesn’t even have the capacity to carry all of the power necessary to fuel needs, and that the co-located facilities would not be contributing to upgrading it. This, FERC argued, could threaten the reliability of the grid and lead to higher electricity rates.