“Ideas have consequences. Even new pathbreaking ones that are shaking the foundations of the Federal Power Act of 1935 and state public utility regulation.”

The Department of Energy has asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to federalize and streamline the connection of large data centers to the interstate transmission grid. DOE last week (Oct. 23) sent FERC a 16-page draft notice of proposed rule making, asking the commission to enact the new, unprecedented rule by the end of April, which is unlikely.

Under the DOE proposal, FERC would take over interconnection decisions for “large load” data centers, defined as those with a load of 20 MW or greater. These decisions are now made by regional transmission organizations, such as the PJM Interconnection, or by state regulatory agencies.

The DOE proposed rule states:

In light of the unprecedented current and expected growth of large loads seeking to interconnect to the transmission system, and to provide open access and non discriminatory access to the transmission system, it has become necessary to standardize interconnection procedures and agreements for such loads, including those seeking to share a point of interconnection with new or existing generation facilities (hybrid facilities).

“ENTRA1’s website is a cyber Potemkin village, all façade with no reality. The site has buttons bragging: ‘drawing on 45+ years of experience’ … ‘portfolio experience of ~6B$ in energy and infrastructure projects’, … ‘delivering on a ~30GW SMR project pipeline.’ Click on those boxed claims for further information and the result is literally nothing.”

When the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) announced this month that it had reached a mammoth deal — financial and timing details unspecified — to acquire 6,000 MW (6 GW) of purchased power from a wide array of NuScale small modular reactors to be owned by ENTRA1–it produced some head-scratching.

What the heck is ENTRA1? It’s not an easy question to answer, although online sleuthing provides some useful details. The name first surfaced in the fall of 2023, when NuScale announced a sketchy deal with an Ohio data center developer with ENTRA1 described as NuScale’s partner with exclusive rights to develop, manage, own and operate energy production plants powered by NuScale’s SMRs.…

“What’s lacking are the products – the SMRs. It’s not the government’s job to pick winners and losers in the race to develop the products. That’s how free markets are supposed to work.”

The Department of Energy last Tuesday (March 24) announced a $900 million pot of money to “de-risk the deployment of Generation III+ light-water small modular reactors (Gen III+ SMR).” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said (although it’s more likely someone wrote the words for him), “America’s nuclear energy renaissance starts now.”

Really? The new solicitation is a dead ringer for the Biden administration’s October 2024 $900 SMR solicitation, in many cases word-for-word, including a ‘two-tier’ structure: $800 million for the first, $100 million for the second. The residue of the Biden initiative has been scrubbed from DOE’s website, probably in hopes that no one would remember it.…

“Since its 2009 formation under Obama, ARPA-E within the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded about $4.2 billion to some 1,700 energy projects. The latest nuclear revival continues a long string of starts-and-stops for a technology that has been more promise than performance.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright and the White House appear to be headed for a clash on major DOE spending programs, including the agency’s Loan Programs Office and the main research arm, Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-Energy).

Last week, DOE earmarked another $57.8 million in federal money to the Palisades nuclear plant resurrection in Michigan, part of a $1.52 DOE billion loan to Holtec International for the project.

Since DOE’s Loan Programs Office approved the deal last September, the agency has doled out almost $96 million for the restart of the 805-MW reactor that shut down in 2022, starting with $38 million this January.…