Last Energy on Friday announced plans to build 30 “micro” nuclear power plants in North Texas in an attempt to meet energy demands for power-hungry data centers moving to Texas.
The Washington, D.C.-based startup has purchased a 200-acre plot of land in Haskell County, about an hour north of Abilene, in response to “overwhelming demand” from data center developers in Texas over the past year, the company explained in its press release.
Last Energy already has commercial agreements to build more than 80 microreactors in Europe, half of which will serve data centers.
Its Texas project would be its first venture in the U.S. and its largest to date, generating 600 megawatts of capacity in all, equivalent to the power demand from 150,000 Texas homes on the hottest days of summer, the Houston Chronicle reported.
The company hopes to have the first reactor built by 2029, at a cost of $100 million, though subsequent reactors would be projected to cost less as it realizes efficiencies, a senior executive told the Chronicle.
Texas already is home to more than 340 data centers which collectively use almost 9% of the grid’s energy, according to solar energy company Perceptive Power Infrastructure, which Last Energy quoted in its announcement. Electricity is cheap for industrial industrial facilities and land is plentiful, which has contributed to its current, and future, popularity for the processing centers that are an indispensable element of artificial intelligence development and large-scale cryptocurrency ventures.
AI’s recent explosion in popularity is fueling demand for bigger and more advanced data centers in the Lone Star State, data centers that in turn will require more energy to operate, such as OpenAI and Oracle’s half-a-trillion-dollar Stargate data complex center, also planned for north of Abilene. (Last Energy’s nuclear project is not affiliated with Stargate, a Last Energy executive told the Chronicle.)
That’s contributing to the Energy Reliability Council of Texas’s projections that overall power demand will double in the next decade, something Last Energy said was a factor in its decision to build the project in Texas.
But the technology behind “small modular reactors” like the ones Last Energy plans to build is still in its infancy, facing high construction costs and other hurdles. Thirty new commercially operated SMRs would increase the tech’s world supply by a factor of 11: Just three such reactors are currently being operated on the planet, and none are based in the United States.
The company has built three prototype SMRs to prove that it can execute on its plans, including one in Brookshire, about 35 miles west of Houston. It showed off another one of those prototypes to federal lawmakers in Washington, D.C. last year.
Last Energy’s announcement aligns with Gov. Greg Abbott’s ambitions to further grow data center production in Texas, and to increase Texas’s presence as a leader in nuclear energy, a priority he called attention to in a prepared statement that was part of Last Energy’s announcement.
“Texas is the energy capital of America, and we are working to be No. 1 in advanced nuclear power,” said Abbott. “Last Energy’s microreactor project in Haskell County will help fulfill the state’s growing data center demand. Texas must become a national leader in advanced nuclear energy. By working together with industry leaders like Last Energy, we will usher in a nuclear power renaissance in the United States.”
