As Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg expands his ravenous data centers, he’s agreed to take over subsidies that Illinois ratepayers have been providing to a nuclear power station in central Illinois since 2017. The move could be the first step in a Silicon Valley bailout of nuclear power stations that supply half the electricity generated in Illinois.

Last month, Zuckerberg announced a 20-year stipend for a Constellation Energy nuclear plant in Clinton, a rural community 25 miles south of Bloomington. He’s helping to plan a second and perhaps even a third reactor for the site and may help foot the bill.

Constellation views its agreement with Zuckerberg as a potential template for four other Illinois nuclear plants where ratepayer subsidies are also set to expire in 2027, said Mason Emnett, Constellation’s senior vice president for public policy.

The biggest nuclear provider in the United States, Constellation owns all six Illinois nuclear plants and has close ties with other artificial intelligence giants. This includes Microsoft, with which Constellation agreed last year to restart a nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania.

By pouring money into nuclear, Zuckerberg and his fellow artificial intelligence billionaires are marking the start of a new epoch in Illinois energy policy.

They stand at the forefront in deciding which power plants Illinois will keep open, expand or build. But they’re launching new data centers faster than power plants in a state already facing electricity shortages and higher prices as coal and gas plants are closed to clean the air.

“The data centers are getting so big, they’re threatening the ability of power grids to supply enough power,” said Bob Johnson, a research analyst at Gartner in Portland, Oregon.

“You either have to pass the extra cost to all the other users, or you allow somebody like Zuckerberg to cover it,” he said. “Then you still have to ask, ‘How are we going get power for everybody else?’”When Zuckerberg announced June 3 that he’s taking over ratepayer subsidies scheduled to end in 2027 for Clinton, he did not buy electricity itself. He also did not pay to reserve some of the plant’s future generating capacity.Rather, he purchased Clinton’s clean energy “attributes.’’ This is an accounting term that means his Meta Platforms, Inc. will have the exclusive right to use the plant’s carbon-free electricity to offset the fossil fuel he’s burning elsewhere in his empire.Zuckerberg is spending heavily for these “attributes” because he’s pledged to offset all his fossil fuel use with renewable and clean power by 2030.

The ultimate impact on other Illinois ratepayers will depend on how rapidly Zuckerberg actually builds both data centers and power plants in future years. 

Urvi Parekh, head of global energy for Meta, wouldn’t detail the company’s future Illinois plans in an interview. But there’s no question they’re big.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is spending up to $65 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025, Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. That’s an increase from about $40 billion last year.The company is rushing partly to capitalize on President Donald Trump’s support for nuclear power. At Trump’s behest, Republicans are accelerating the phaseout of investment tax credits for wind and solar but retain them for fossil fuel and nuclear energy. 

With a series of executive orders, the president has outlined plans to quadruple U.S. nuclear power output, streamline the licensing process and have 10 new reactors under construction by 2030.

Neither Meta nor Constellation would specify how much Zuckerberg will pay for Clinton’s “attributes.’’Since 2017, according to the Illinois Power Agency, ratepayers have subsidized the Clinton plant to the tune of $777 million. If Zuckerberg spends at the same rate, he’ll pay about $2 billion over 20 years to Constellation.

Meta and Constellation are working together to evaluate a variety of reactor sizes and designs for a possible Clinton expansion, Emnett said.“The fact that we’re participating in a request-for-proposals to discuss the potential third reactor at a site which was moving toward shutdown in the past is very exciting within the nuclear industry,” Emnett said. “We’re just in a different spot, and we’re very proud to be working with Meta on that.”

Meta hopes to decide on its nuclear expansion plans at Clinton and elsewhere by the end of the year, Parekh said.
Meta has plenty of options because, at the end of March, the company had $70.2 billion in cash and marketable securities on hand.

With Zuckerberg’s revenue stream in hand, Constellation can complete the relicensing of the Clinton plant and make the investments needed to continue operations for 20 years, Emnett said.

Constellation, meanwhile, is in talks with a variety of customers and data center developers about future possibilities at its other Illinois plants, Emnett said.

Constellation was spun off in 2022 by Exelon, which runs major electricity grids in Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Exelon distributes the power Constellation’s plants create. Commonwealth Edison, the biggest electric utility in Illinois, is a subsidiary of Exelon.

Zuckerberg’s Clinton announcement came three days after the Illinois legislature balked at, among other things, forcing data centers and other businesses to “bring their own” renewable power as they grow or pay higher electricity rates.

Constellation, its labor allies and a trade group that includes Meta all opposed the measure. 

It’s an increasingly widespread debate. Data center power demand will double in the U.S. by 2030 and account for nearly 9% of the country’s total electricity use by 2035, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

The research group lists northern Illinois as a data center hotspot.

Mark Denzler, president of the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association, said the bill would have significantly boosted costs and construction times not just for data centers but also for schools, hospitals and factories.

“The states that are going to win are the states that are leading on energy and workforce and how quickly you can get a shovel in the ground,” Denzler said.

Clinton plant’s rough start

When the Clinton plant opened in 1987, it was seven years late and 10 times over budget. Endless factory closings in nearby towns such as Decatur had long since undermined the business case for a second reactor. A decade after the plant opened, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission shut it back down for 2½ years after a recirculating pump failed and dumped 7,000 gallons of radioactive water into the reactor building.

Today, decades after this notorious shutdown and decades after Constellation’s predecessor Exelon bought the plant and upgraded its training and equipment, being a one-reactor power station still hinders Clinton. “This means less electricity to sell to cover the costs of running the plant,’’ Emnett said.

The plant’s operators are reminded of this problem every day. As they walk through the glass-enclosed bridge that connects their administrative offices to the plant, they can look down to the left or right and see rusty rebar and high-pressure pipes installed decades ago for the second reactor.Inside, the plant feels like the fortress that it is, with razor wire, gun-toting guards and endless security stations that monitor the identities and radiation exposures of people coming and going.

In the control room on a 95-degree Monday, the high temperature of the surrounding 5,000-acre cooling lake forced operators to dial back the reactor. Every five weeks, control room operators report for a week of training that includes computer simulations of all conceivable reactor malfunctions, said Andy Krukowski, plant manager. It’s the kind of intense, career-long training found in just a handful of professions, including airline pilots and astronauts, he said.

In the yard outside, just a few feet away from the reactor, spent fuel rods encased in steel-and-concrete storage casks languish for eternities as they cool down enough for safe disposal. 

Workers will install another set of fuel rods this fall during a long-planned, 20-day shutdown when the plant will stop producing electricity. The regular workforce of 532 will temporarily expand to include up to 3,000 skilled tradespeople from around the country. They’ll work not just on fuel rods but on all manner of maintenance chores and equipment upgrades, such as bigger pipes to pump more water through the turbines so the plant can make more electricity. Clinton’s workers went through the same exercise in 2023. When this year’s shutdown arrives, they’re hoping to celebrate what the nuclear industry calls a “breaker-to-breaker run.’’ This means no unplanned outages between scheduled refueling stops. It would be another milestone in the plant’s emergence as one of Constellation’s best operational performers, Krukowski said.

The plant is located east of downtown Clinton across 8 miles of corn and soybeans. A big wind farm hovers over the town and also supplies 125 megawatts of power to Meta. On June 26, Meta agreed to buy another 791 megawatts of solar and wind energy for data centers in Ohio, Arkansas and Texas from Invenergy, which is based in Chicago.

Clinton has just 7,500 residents. They’ve given themselves over to nuclear power so totally that for years they sponsored “Glow in the Dark” regattas out at the cooling lake. They dubbed their local AM station “radio active.”

The plant is embedded in the lives of Mayor Helen Michelassi and her family. Her husband, her two brothers and her brother-in-law worked at the plant or helped build it. 

“One of our kids said the plant looks like a big, blue monster,” referring to how the reactor and turbine buildings are painted, Michelassi said. “And we were like, ‘OK, but it pays well.’”

Michelassi is a part-time mayor and the retiring executive director of Prairieland Service Coordination Inc., which provides social services to children with disabilities and others. She says she’s terrified by the pending Medicaid cuts in Washington, D.C., and so is even more grateful for having nuclear power in her town.

“When Meta comes along and says, `Hey, we’ve got AI and we’ll take some of that power,’ that’s like manna from heaven,” Michelassi said.“It becomes very pragmatic and very small for me,” she said. “It means our emergency services and our hospital and our school district can say, ‘OK, that tax revenue isn’t going anywhere.’ It means Constellation will still be saying, ‘Here’s $5,000. Go buy crayons for kids who can’t buy their own school supplies.’”

A ripple effect

Meta’s impact won’t just be felt in Clinton. It will ripple across the state.The key question, according to Jackson Morris, director of state energy policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council, is whether the company will add deliverable, carbon-free generating capacity such as new wind, solar or nuclear at the same rate at which it’s building data centers.

“It takes 18 to 24 months to build a data center and 10 years to build a nuclear plant,” Morris said. “There’s going to be this messy middle period where we have to speed up the interconnection of new zero-emissions generating resources dramatically to avoid bad consumer and emissions impacts.”Meta’s Parekh acknowledged the time lag with nuclear. But she said other types of power are coming online faster and are keeping Meta’s clean energy expansion on pace with its data center growth. “We hold ourselves to making sure there’s enough megawatt hours of clean electricity to support all of the consumption we have in a year,’’ she said. “We need to ensure that ratepayers have comfort, that their lights stay on and they don’t feel harmed by the innovation that’s happening through AI,’’ Parekh said.Meta’s clean energy promises would be even more meaningful if, like those from Google’s parent Alphabet, they included only power sources that are new and capable of delivering electricity to the actual data centers that need it, Morris said. That’s not possible if, for example, the power source is on the other side of an ocean from the data center, he said.Meta says it counts and uses its “attributes’’ in ways that are best for the environment long term and that have already helped it become one of the world’s largest corporate buyers of clean energy. In the case of Clinton, Parekh said, Meta felt it had to act to save a clean power source that may have gone out of business. 

“What we heard from Constellation is they had to make a decision soon about the future of this power plant with the state program going away,” she said.

Illinois remains a net energy exporter, thanks to its 11 nuclear reactors, the most of any state. However, a massive shortfall is looming as the state prepares to close 28 gigawatts of coal and natural gas generating plants by 2045. 

That’s nearly equal to the 31 gigawatts of electricity that ComEd uses today to power the northern fifth of Illinois, including Chicago.

If Meta’s data center spending does help Illinois wean itself off nuclear subsidies, it will mean one less headache for lawmakers whose first attempt to pass an energy bill this year ended in failure.

In May, the legislature rejected a plan to force data centers and other big electricity users to invest in their own renewable power sources as they grow. If they don’t, they’d have to pay six times as much as other ratepayers into a state fund for subsidizing renewable investments. 

Environmentalists pushed for this in part because the fund could start running a deficit in 2028, according to the state’s power agency. Such a deficit would shut down incentives for renewable investments across Illinois. 

Amanda Pankau, director of energy issues for the Prairie Rivers Network, a Champaign-based environmental group, said allowing renewable investments to lapse would be a mistake.“Nuclear is expensive and takes a long time but data centers are looking to connect to the grid quickly,” said Pankau, who lives on a farm 15 miles from the Clinton nuclear plant. “Wind and solar paired with battery storage is a very cost-effective and quick way to get new capacity on the grid,” she said.

The data center dispute in Springfield helped stall a wide-ranging bill that would have also upgraded the state’s battery storage and energy efficiency programs, as well as its planning and procurement tools to better match electricity-generating investments with long-term demand.

Legislative leaders have promised to try again in October. Depending on when they plan to implement the changes, they may need a three-fifths vote instead of a simple majority. And they’ll face constant complaints about the rising cost of electricity.

In June, average monthly residential bills rose by $14.50 at ComEd and $17 at Ameren just to reserve future generating capacity for regional transmission grids. On a percentage basis, these were both double-digit increases. In a recent study, the Illinois Power Agency projected continued steep increases in capacity prices for the next quarter century.

“We haven’t seen demand growth like this since World War II and we’ve never seen demand growth that looks like these data centers,” said Jackson Morris of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “We have to make sure with 100% certainty that low-income customers and small businesses are not subsidizing these large loads.

“I get it that Meta might say, ‘It’s up to the state of Illinois and the regional grids to build more clean power, right? My counterargument is, ‘Well, you’re a trillion-dollar company, and you should be part of the solution.’”