Is it curtains for Chicago-based Exelon’s Byron and Dresden nuclear plants? That’s what CEO Chris Crain strongly indicated in an Aug. 4 second quarter earnings statement, Nuclear News reported. In a conference call, Crane said that pending state and federal legislation to bail out the money-losing Illinois plants “remains uncertain and, regardless, will come too late to save our Byron and Dresden plants from early retirement this fall. While we remain hopeful that a state solution will pass in time to save the plants, clean energy legislation in Illinois remains caught in negotiations over unrelated policy matters, leaving us no choice but to continue down the path of closing the plants.”
Exelon Generation in late July filed plans with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to shut down the plants and decommission them starting in September for Byron and December for Dresden. The company has been working with the Illinois state government, with support from Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, for a rescue plan after earlier plans collapsed during a bribery scandal that brought down the long-standing, feared Democratic Speaker of the House, Mike Madigan.
But the Illinois legislature has adjourned, and there appear to be no prospects to avoid the September date for Byron or even Dresden.
The bipartisan infrastructure bill now pending in the U.S. Senate contains $6 billion for the Department of Energy to save floundering nuclear plants. As Utility Dive reported, there is House and Senate legislation that would provide a $15/MWh production tax credit for existing nuclear plants, which produce no carbon dioxide emissions. Even if the infrastructure bill passes the Senate this week or next, House Speaker Nance Pelosi (D-Calif) has said she won’t schedule it for a vote until the Senate also passes a Democrat-only, bigger infrastructure bill first. That appears unlikely.
But Crane hedged a bit during an earnings conference call, and his pessimism may be a tactic in a longer end game, aimed at pushing the legislators into action. “Running [an extra year] is physically impossible. Running an extra month is very challenging,” he said.
The Byron station consists of two 1,100-MW Westinghouse pressurized water reactors. The units went into service in 1985 and 1987 and have a lifetime capacity factor of 85%. Dresden is made up of two 900-MW General Electric boiling water reactors with Mark 1 containments, which went into service in 1970 and 1971. They have a 73% lifetime capacity factor. An earlier unit, which went into service in 1960 as one of the early U.S. commercial reactors, and the first privately-financed, shut down in 1978.
Both stations sell their power into the wholesale PJM market for retail distribution, and have been unsuccessful in recent PJM auctions.
–Kennedy Maize
(kenmaize@gmail.com)