Constellation Energy’s high-profile effort to revive one of the Three Mile Island reactor plants, now renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center, has run into a four-year-tall roadblock: the grid itself.
The company had targeted a restart in the second half of 2027 to deliver roughly 835 megawatts of nuclear power to Microsoft data centers under a long-term agreement.
Yet PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator, reports full deliverability could take until 2031.
The holdup stems from needed transmission upgrades.
The $1 billion loan secured by Constellation has only been followed by delays…
BOOM
*CONSTELLATION GETS $1B US LOAN TO REOPEN THREE MILE ISLAND
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Constellation pushed back quickly, insisting the plant remains on schedule for 2027 operations and that it is actively negotiating with PJM and local utilities to shorten the timeline. The 2031 date, the company said, reflects only the point of complete certainty around upgrades rather than an outright bar to earlier partial output.
The real culprit is not the data centers driving the demand. Tech giants and hyperscalers are not conjuring the problem out of thin air. Decades of underinvestment in transmission lines, permitting bottlenecks, and overloaded interconnection queues have left the grid ill-equipped for any surge, whether from nuclear restarts, renewables, or new industrial loads. PJM’s own studies show the system has evolved since Three Mile Island’s 2019 closure, yet the backlog of projects, both generation and demand, continues to grow. Utilities and operators face the same squeeze whether the request comes from a reactor or a server farm.
Less than a year ago, Bloomberg reported Constellation Energy moved the restart date up one year from the original 2028 completion date to 2027. The reactor owner noted the connection to the PJM grid would take another year, to 2028. Yet, here we are nine months later and that grid connection timeline has already moved out an additional three years.
Just last month, the IEA warned electricity demand is rising fast while over 2,500 GW of projects worldwide sit stalled in connection queues, with the U.S. portion especially strained. We also noted transmission projects routinely face five-to-seven-year delays from permitting and interconnection hurdles.
The pattern is clear. Data centers expose the weakness; they do not create it.
Until transmission spending and permitting catch up with the real-world need for reliable power, even the cleanest, most reliable plants will sit idle longer than planned.
The Three Mile Island delay is simply the latest symptom of a system that has been neglected for far too long.
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