Exelon Energy is a major generation company, and one that is heavily invested in nuclear.  Over 93% of their 31,000 megawatt fleet is nuclear fueled, making Exelon the owner of Americas largest nuclear generation portfolio and the third largest nuclear fleet in the world [1].  However, the big news out of Exelon this past week was not a new nuclear proposal, but instead a major acquisition of renewable energy assets. 

Exelon announced that they had purchased John Deere’s renewable energy business for $900 million.  This acquisition adds 735 megawatts of wind power from 36 projects to Exelon’s fleet, with another 230 megawatts of projects in “advanced development”.  As reported by the New York Times, this purchase makes Exelon “one of the nation’s largest wind operators” overnight [2].

What makes this acquisition particularly interesting is that earlier this year Exelon withdrew a proposal to build a new nuclear station and instead asked the nuclear regulatory commission for an early site permit only [3].  This will allow them to revisit building the plant in the future – but the permit review takes several years, clearly halting any near-term construction probability.  Exelon also recently announced they were contracting out $1 billion over the next 10 years to EnergySolutions for dismantling of one of their existing nuclear stations that has sat idle since the late 1990’s [4].

So why are we seeing this potentially dramatic shift in focus from a US nuclear giant?  There are likely many reasons, but clearly the uncertain economics and high cost of nuclear power must be near the top.  In 2007, Duke Energy estimated that their proposed Lee Nuclear Station would cost between $4 – 6 billion.  In early 2008 that number increased to over $11 billion, and finally in late 2008, Duke announced it would no longer publically disclose cost information on the plant [5].  The cost of Progress Energy’s Levy County nuclear plant in Florida that uses the same technology as Duke’s Lee station was initially projected at fewer than $6 billion, but was revised in 2008 to $17 billion [6].  The same day that Exelon announced their purchase, another article discussing the status of new nuclear plants on the other side of the Atlantic was published, which warned “new nuclear projects are simply too large without resorting to subsidies” [7]. 

Perhaps Exelon has decided that the cost of new nuclear is not worth it, and their investments are better spent on renewable generation?  For less than $1 billion, Exelon added the equivalent of a small nuclear power plant (like Progress’ Robinson Nuclear Station[8]) to their generation capacity.  Regardless of what the ultimate reason for Exelon’s decision was, it is certainly exciting to see a major nuclear utility showing this type of investment commitment in wind energy.