Dive Brief:
- The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s recent rejection of an amended inteconnection service agreement that would facilitate providing power directly from a nuclear power plant to an Amazon data center is unlikely to impact NuScale’s efforts to court data center customers, NuScale CEO John Hopkins said Thursday on the company’s third-quarter earnings webcast.
- Although FERC’s ruling suggests the commission “wants to have electrons on the grid [instead of] behind the meter,” it’s too early to say how the ruling will impact future colocation opportunities, Hopkins added.
- NuScale lost $41 million in the third quarter, down sharply from a $92.9 million loss in the third quarter of 2023 following an aggressive campaign to cut costs, it said in its Q3 2024 earnings release.
Dive Insight:
Hopkins on Thursday downplayed the impacts of FERC’s decision to reject an amended interconnection service agreement that would have facilitated expanded power sales to a co-located Amazon data center from the Susquehanna nuclear power plant.
But while a flurry of deals have been announced this fall knitting advanced nuclear technology companies and power-hungry customers — including the 500-MW Google-Kairos Power partnership and a potentially much larger deal between Amazon and X-energy — NuScale has yet to announce any agreements with U.S. utilities, data center operators or industrial customers.
“Negotiating agreements is a complex process that takes time … but we remain confident that we can achieve our near-term sales goals,” Hopkins said. “NuScale’s technology is years ahead of other proposed SMR technologies.”
Following the Thursday earnings report and webcast, NuScale’s share price rose more than 10% early Friday but trimmed its gains to around 6% in late-afternoon trading. It fell about 10% early Monday morning. Still, the stock has gained around 20% since Nov. 4 as investors cheered NuScale’s cost-cutting efforts and anticipated supportive policy from the incoming Trump administration.
Hopkins and other NuScale officials highlighted a number of positive developments for the company.
For starters, NuScale expects its application before the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to uprate its reactor design from 50 MW to 77 MW will conclude by mid-2025, Hopkins said.
The upsized reactor design is based on the “same fundamental safety case and features approved by the NRC in 2020” and will help NuScale more effectively serve hyperscale data centers and other power-hungry clients, he said.
NuScale’s uprate application relates more to the design of NuScale’s power modules than that of its power plants, which are envisioned as clusters of six or 12 modules, Chief Commercial Officer Clayton Scott said later on the webcast.
Though NuScale’s previous licensing activity focused on the six-module power plant design, “when we do our first 12-module site … we’ll do a site-specific license based on the 12-module [design] and whatever site parameters we have to evaluate,” he said.
NuScale also confirmed in its earnings release that it signed a contract with Fluor Corporation to commence the next phase of engineering study for the planned 462-MW Doicești power plant in Romania. Led by Fluor Corporation, NuScale’s majority owner, the Doicești project would be the first commercial small modular reactor in Europe.
Phase 2 of the front-end engineering and design study, or FEED, is underway and should take 12 to 14 months, setting the Doicești project up for final investment decision “about a year from now,” Hopkins said.
The Doicești project is not subject to the subscription risk that derailed NuScale’s 462-MW Carbon Free Power Project last year, Hopkins said. That effort, which would have provided electricity to dozens of Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems members, ended last November as costs escalated and customer subscriptions failed to materialize.
NuScale signed a separate international agreement in August with Nuclear Power Ghana and Regnum Technology Group to pursue development of a 924-MW power plant in the West African country.
