Talen Energy lost 2.42%, Constellation Energy fell 9.75%, while its competitor Vistra Corp fell 3.05% around 5:30 p.m.
Several nuclear energy companies slipped on Monday on the New York Stock Exchange, destabilized by the refusal of the American energy regulator of a project to supply power to Amazon.
The news cast a chill on the sector, recently boosted by a series of agreements with several remote (cloud) computing giants to ensure their supply of electricity from nuclear sources.
In March, Amazon agreed with the operator Talen Energy to buy a data storage and processing center (data center), directly powered by the Susquehanna nuclear power plant (Pennyslvania) and which is located on the same site.
In June, PJM Interconnection, a member organization of the northeastern United States power grid, submitted an application to the Federal Energy Regulatory Authority (FERC) to increase the power capacity of this data center by 300 at 480 megawatts.
In a notice dated Friday, FERC rejected this request, with one of the five members of the regulator’s board, Mark Christie, estimating that this type of project “could have major consequences for the reliability of the network and the costs for the consumers”.
Talen Energy contested the decision, saying its project was “fair, reasonable and in the interest of consumers,” according to a statement released Sunday.
The regulator’s position “will have the effect of slowing down the economic development of states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Jersey,” argued the group, which indicated that it would continue its dialogue with FERC to find a more effective solution. favorable to the case.
This development shook several energy companies on Wall Street, starting with Talen Energy, which lost 2.42% around 4:30 p.m. GMT.
A major operator of nuclear power plants in the United States, Constellation Energy lost 9.75%, while its competitor Vistra Corp lost 3.05%.
Other victims of this investor tension are the start-ups currently developing new generation nuclear reactors, SMRs (small modular reactors).
Oklo, chaired by OpenAI boss Sam Altman, was poorly oriented (-3.37%), as was NuScale (-4.23%).
Amazon, Microsoft and Google have all signed partnerships with nuclear operators to meet their growing electricity needs.
The development of generative artificial intelligence has further accelerated the already significant energy consumption of their data processing and storage centers.
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