Constellation collaborates with our customers, suppliers, universities, governments, national labs, and startups to support innovations that will accelerate our clean energy future. These projects:
In April 2022, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) awarded a $2.5 million grant to Constellation and its project partners to explore the benefits of constructing direct air capture (DAC) technology at the company’s Byron nuclear energy plant. While nuclear plants do not produce any carbon emissions, direct air capture would remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere, a possible next-generation technology to help our nation combat the climate crisis.
The DAC project at Byron Generating Station could capture 250,000 tons of CO2 each year, reducing global carbon emissions and helping to decarbonize energy intensive sectors of the economy. The study will also focus on the potential for a nuclear plant to become the center of a direct air carbon capture hub, partnering the DAC technology with storage of CO2.
Achieving 100% carbon-free power is a key sustainability goal for many organizations. As customers make the transition to 100% carbon-free, many are looking to bridge the gap between their real-time electricity demand and available sources of carbon-free power. Currently, energy markets have limited options for tracking and matching carbon-free supply with demand on an hour-by-hour basis, and most organizations pursuing zero emissions power match their electricity use with renewable energy certificates, or RECs, on an annual basis. Learn more.
Constellation was the recipient of a Department of Energy (DOE) grant in 2021 to explore the potential benefits of on-site hydrogen production at Nine Mile Point Nuclear Station in Oswego, NY. Constellation will partner with Nel Hydrogen, Argonne National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to demonstrate integrated production, storage, and normal usage at the station. The project will generate an economical supply of hydrogen, a natural byproduct of nuclear energy, to be safely captured, stored, and potentially taken to market as a 100 percent carbon-free source of power.
Learn more about this project and, more broadly, how clean hydrogen, produced by emissions-free power, holds the key to solving the climate crisis.
NET Power, LLC is a strategic venture between Constellation, 8 Rivers, McDermott, and Occidental Petroleum. The mission of NET Power is to provide advanced clean energy to consumers worldwide by generating lower-cost power with zero emissions. NET Power is a clean energy technology company that promotes, develops, and licenses a proprietary process for efficiently generating electricity from natural gas while capturing all CO₂ emissions. NET Power’s revolutionary technology promises to enable the world to meet its climate goals without paying more for electricity.
Nearly every business transaction, internet search, scientific breakthrough, or healthcare innovation that powers our economy and improves our way of life at some point passes through one or more data centers, which house the technology that makes up the backbone of our nation’s digital economy. Data centers are also considered critical infrastructure, essential to national security and the nation’s financial, healthcare, communications and transportation systems.
Because of the central role they play in our daily lives, data centers need energy that is reliable in every hour of every day, and it has to be clean. That’s why Constellation is working with technology companies to power the next generation of data centers with nuclear energy, which is the only source of carbon-free energy that can operate reliably in any kind of weather, every day.
The nation’s dependence on data centers is only growing as ever more powerful computers and artificial intelligence combine to accelerate the pace of innovation, leading to technological advancements that will transform our lives as much – if not considerably more -- as the printing press, steam engine and Internet did in past generations.
Major technology companies are in a global race to develop new, hyperscale data centers to power innovations in artificial intelligence, which has the potential to transform entire industries and lead to technological breakthroughs in everything from medicine to climate change solutions.
The U.S. and other countries are competing to lead development of this transformational technology and capture the jobs and economic growth that it will deliver. That’s why nuclear energy and data centers go together like peanut butter and jelly. By co-locating data centers next to a nuclear plant, we can quickly deliver clean energy directly to the facility and reduce the need to build new transmission lines to serve this critical infrastructure, while also ensuring that our nation’s nuclear fleet continues to operate well into the future. That saves consumers money, benefits grid reliability and makes more efficient use of clean, carbon-free energy.
Co-location can be a more affordable, efficient and expedient way to build our nation’s growing data center economy while creating thousands of jobs and minimizing costs for utility customers. Pairing nuclear plants with data centers will allow us to extend the life of these clean, safe and reliable facilities and deliver a win for the environment, large load customers and utility customers alike. Learn more about data centers
Constellation engages in energy storage technology development through a strategic relationship with Volta Energy Technologies. Through this relationship, Constellation has invested in four storage companies with transformational solutions relevant to the grid. Constellation and Albemarle Corporation, the leading lithium supplier for energy storage and other applications, were the founding investors in Volta in 2017.
Constellation collaborated with Kevala, Inc., a nationwide leader in energy data and grid analytics, and leading energy and utility providers National Grid and ComEd, an Exelon company, on groundbreaking new carbon accounting research in 2021. The companies released a joint whitepaper, "Total Carbon Accounting: A Framework to Deliver Localized Carbon Intensity Data," which explores advanced analytic methods designed to better compute the carbon intensity of grid electricity with higher degrees of geographic and temporal granularity. These methods can help ensure the energy sector is best equipped to evaluate, prioritize, and measure decarbonization activities in the future. In leveraging TCA's comprehensive methodology, key energy stakeholders can more accurately match carbon-free power supplies to load forecasts.
Rolls-Royce Holdings plc and Constellation signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2020 to pursue the potential for Constellation to operate compact nuclear power stations both in the United Kingdom and internationally. Constellation will be using its operational experience to assist Rolls-Royce in the development and deployment of the UKSMR.
