CEO Joseph Dominguez told investors that the company was intending to file a request to the Federal Electricity Regulatory Commission (FERC) to transfer capacity rights from its Eddystone plant to enable the restart.
Constellation announced in 2024 that it would restart the pressurised water reactor, which closed down in 1999, after signing a 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft. Last year, the company filed an interconnection request with regional transmission operator PJM to allow Crane to add its 835 megawatts of emissions-free power to the grid.
Initially aiming for a 2028 restart, the company had brought its target date forward to 2027 following PJM's approval of its early interconnection request. However, at last week's CERA Week conference in Houston, Constellation's chief external affairs and growth officer David Dardis told Reuters that PJM had said it would take until 2031 to complete some of the transmission upgrades needed for the plant to connect to the grid.
Speaking in Constellation's 2026 Business and Earnings Outlook call, Dominguez said the company still expected to be able to start the unit in 2027.
"We talked this week about PJM studies that indicate interconnection could be delayed into the 2030s," Dominguez said. "I want to assure you we are working on that with PJM and we continue to expect to start this unit in 2027. Today, we will be filing a FERC request to be able to transfer capacity injection rights from our Eddystone unit to Crane to facilitate restart in '27, according to our plan."
Eddystone is a six-unit, dual-fuelled plant in Pennsylvania, with two 380 MW capacity subcritical steam boiler-turbine generator units that can run on either natural gas or oil, depending on market conditions, and two pairs of oil-fuelled peaking units that run during periods of high demand with a total capacity of 60 MW. The 380 MW units - Eddystone 3 and 4 - had been scheduled for closure last year, but have been kept online beyond their planned retirement date to ensure grid reliability under a series of emergency orders issued by US Energy Secretary Chris Wright. The most recent order was issued in February and remains in force until 24 May.
The Crane Clean Energy Center restart project is receiving federal support through the US Department of Energy's loan programme.
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