On August 10, 2020, a derecho packing winds up to 140 mph tore through Iowa and knocked out the cooling tower at the Duane Arnold Energy Center. The 615-megawatt nuclear plant was already slated for retirement — the storm just got there first. Five years later, what's bringing it back isn't policy. It's AI data centers' hunger for power.
The Department of Energy has approved a $1.9 billion loan to NextEra Energy to restart the plant in Linn County. According to figures NextEra provided last year, once the facility is back online, the power will be purchased by Google to run its AI data centers, while also shoring up grid reliability in the area and creating "thousands" of direct and indirect jobs — a figure that comes from NextEra itself, with no independent data yet to confirm the scale.
Google's approach to energy sourcing hasn't been consistent. The company once pledged to offset its power use with green and renewable energy, hitting that goal back in 2018 — but more recently, one of its data centers in Texas has been running on power from a natural gas plant. Data centers operated by companies like Tesla and Meta have also been spotted pulling from conventional grid power, or even running their own gas generators on-site. By comparison, this nuclear deal gives Google access to a relatively low-carbon power source — though nuclear waste disposal remains a separate issue, and there's no mention of how Google plans to address it.
The DOE currently has plans to restart three decommissioned nuclear plants, with power meant to serve both the general grid and AI data centers — this loan is one piece of that broader push. NextEra expects Duane Arnold to be generating power again by 2029, meaning there's still nearly a three-year gap between the loan approval and actual power delivery. In the world of nuclear plant restarts, $1.9 billion isn't an especially large price tag.
