What we know now is that the nation, the country is short of electrons and we need to build more generation.
We do have an incredible demand, increasing demand for energy.
We are seeing fundamental growth in the demand for electricity.
Why do we suddenly need so much more electricity? Well, we've all heard about AI data centers hungry for energy that would satisfy medium-sized cities, but it turns out that's only part of the story.
AI data centers appear to be the sort of fastest coming and largest new source, but over the long term, reshoring of manufacturing will be incredibly important as well.
Joseph Majkut is director of the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at CSIS and author of a paper on energy strategy for the Aspen Economic Strategy Group.
When we look at the onshoring of manufacturing, there's a couple different sources of new demand that are going to really come to bear in the next few years. One is semiconductor manufacturing. As the U.S. has tried to secure that supply chain, the government is making investments in public-private partnerships in building leading fabrication facilities here in the U.S. The U.S. for the previous decades had had very little growth in its use of electricity. We now foresee growth between 20 and 100% over the next 15 years.
So, where are all these electrons going to come from? If we're going to double our energy supply, or even just lift it by 20% over the next 15 years, one of the sources will have to be nuclear.
Nuclear is going to be a contributing factor for sure. I think we need to continually apply the right technologies where the right resources exist.
Scott Strazik is president and CEO of GE Vernova, whose business includes power solutions from nuclear, natural gas, and wind.
In the U.S., as an example, we do have very inexpensive gas. Because of that, we do want to leverage that resource. At the same time, we have a lot of good land that has good fuel in the form of wind and solar. Where those resources exist, we should use them. Where nuclear plays a really important role is where those natural resources aren't readily available, and it's especially important in places where we need what we call power-dense solutions. And what I mean by that is places that need electrons that don't have a lot of space, because we can build nuclear in a fairly small amount of space, yet it creates a lot of electrons.
If nuclear is going to be an important part of meeting our energy demands, it has a long way to go. The U.S. has had commercial nuclear power plants since the late 1950s, but only two have come online in the last 30 years. Today, only about 20% of electricity comes from nuclear generation, a number that hasn't increased for decades.
Historically, when we've been building nuclear plants, because they require a lot of infrastructure, they require a lot of security apparatus, we would build one plant that would be directionally a gigawatt in size, and that's a lot. That's a million homes that it's powering directionally. Today, what we're working on is a small modular reactor, which is a 300 megawatt application.
Historically, the U.S. has built very large light water nuclear reactors, and while that supply chain has atrophied, we have partners who can supply that technology. It is licensed and ready to be built when it can achieve financing. Those are large grid-scale reactors. Reactors of another size, of other designs, still have to make it through the regulatory process, but they hold great promise, both as grid-serving entities, maybe running smaller microgrids, working for industrial facilities. I don't think the right question is to say 'Which of these is going to win?' but rather 'How do we build an ecosystem that can support both?' Because both will provide solid services to U.S. consumers, as well as export opportunities for the United States.
One of the challenges in the nuclear industry is when we were building them at a gigawatt size, each one was a little different, and with each one being a little bit bespoke and unique, the cost was always higher than desirable. By scaling to a smaller product that we can fit into many more applications, we have a much higher degree of confidence that we can come down the cost curve, because ultimately affordability matters, and nuclear is very attractive because it's a zero-carbon electron, but early it's going to be more expensive, and we need to give the industry and our end customers confidence that we can come down the cost curve as we gain more volume, which I'm highly confident we can do.
What about the fuel source? Is the fuel the same for the big gigawatt as it is for the 300 megawatt?
