As Maryland officials scramble to meet the state’s ambitious clean energy mandates, they are coalescing around a concept that seemed unthinkable a decade ago: That nuclear energy must be part of the solution.

Even environmentalists are coming to terms with the idea.

Paul Pinsky, the director of the Maryland Energy Administration, and one of the leading climate advocates in Annapolis during his long tenure in the General Assembly, recalled protesting against nuclear power plants in the 1970s. Now, he says, nuclear has “become a staple” in the state and nation’s energy portfolio, even if many Americans don’t realize it.

“If you asked 100 people on the street if their lights came on because of nuclear energy, I would guess three people would know it,” Pinsky said.

The Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in Southern Maryland, which opened in 1975, generates about 40% of the energy produced in Maryland — all of it carbon-free. More than 80% of the clean energy generated in the state comes from the nuclear plant.

But nuclear continues to be hamstrung by a reputation, gained largely after high-profile disasters at power plants in the 1970s and 1980s, that it’s dangerous. The nuclear industry has also been struggling financially: Several nuclear power plants across the country have been decommissioned over the past few decades, in part because more natural gas power is being generated in the U.S. than ever before, which is far cheaper to produce.

Yet clean energy mandates have prompted policymakers to take another look at nuclear, knowing that whatever progress is being made developing other clean energy sources is inadequate for meeting short- and medium-term goals. In Maryland, the 2022 Climate Solutions Now legislation, which Pinsky co-sponsored, requires the state to create a 100% clean energy standard by 2035, while reaching zero carbon emissions by 2045.

For the past few years, stakeholders in Maryland’s nuclear industry have been angling for greater recognition — and possibly financial incentives — from state authorities, and they soon may get their wish.

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“We appreciate the fact that we’re hearing people talk about recognizing nuclear in the state’s clean energy program,” said Mason Emnett, director of public policy at Constellation Energy, which owns and operates Calvert Cliffs.

But four months before the kick-off of the 2025 General Assembly session, it isn’t clear yet if there will be concrete legislative action to bolster nuclear.

“We’re not exactly sure what to expect from the upcoming legislative session,” Emnett said. And at this stage, the industry does not appear to have a specific ask.

The leaders of the two relevant legislative committees in Annapolis, Senate Education, Energy and Environment Chair Brian J. Feldman (D-Montgomery) and House Economic Matters Chair C.T. Wilson (D-Charles), are both supportive of nuclear in the broadest sense. But neither seems ready just yet to advance or embrace specific legislation.

“There is a lot of discussion about how do we get to 100% clean energy by 2035 without nuclear being part of the picture?” Feldman said in a recent interview. He predicted that legislation would emerge in the next session addressing how to bolster clean energy production in Maryland.

Wilson said he expects legislation to be introduced “incentivizing new nuclear deals,” similar to measures from recent sessions that have attempted to bolster solar energy installations and offshore wind production in Maryland. He added that because it takes so long to develop new nuclear facilities, the state needs to act quickly to produce results that may not be realized for several years.

“It may be a very viable opportunity, but it’s way out in the future,” Wilson said in an interview. “It would be nice to start stimulating something.”

One possible legislative solution would be to include nuclear energy in the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), which provides financial credits, known as RECs, for producers or suppliers of certain clean energy sources.

Every year in Annapolis, bills are introduced to tweak the RPS, usually to add a clean energy source to the standard or to eliminate one that’s considered dirty — or to change the complicated tiered system for calculating financial credits. But they rarely get very far, in part because they are complicated and cumbersome and are lobbied heavily by powerful interests that stand to gain or lose from the legislation.

For 2025, Del. Lorig Charkoudian (D-Montgomery), one of the leading environmentalists in the legislature and the top energy policy wonk, is contemplating legislation that would eliminate the RPS altogether and replace it with a system that would provide new and different types of incentives for clean energy producers. Charkoudian said the current RPS is flawed because it focuses on arcane compliance numbers without incentivizing clean energy production.

“We know we need to build energy generation in Maryland, and any generation we build in 2024 and beyond has to be clean,” she said. “That’s why we need to restructure our clean energy compliance. We need to do something that begins to address resource adequacy.”

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Charkoudian said any new system for incentivizing clean energy production would have to include nuclear, to ensure that Calvert Cliffs, the state’s only nuclear plant, stays open for the foreseeable future. The two reactors at the nuclear plant along the Chesapeake Bay in Lusby are licensed to operate through 2034 and 2036, respectively, and Constellation will begin the application process for renewing their licenses through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission late this decade.

Beyond Charkoudian’s proposed legislation, which is still being developed, “there’s going to be a large conversation [during the 2025 session] about our Renewable Portfolio Standard,” Feldman predicted.

Charkoudian said she expects some of her colleagues to advance nuclear bills in the upcoming session.

“I think there’s a range of thoughts about what they should be,” she said.

An economic challenge

The federal government, through the Inflation Reduction Act, currently has an incentive providing tax credits for nuclear energy production that lasts through 2032. Whether a dysfunctional Congress can extend it when it nears its expiration is very much an open question. But that credit, and any incentives for nuclear that the state can provide, will help to ensure Constellation’s robust investment in the Calvert Cliffs plant.

“The economics of nuclear continue to be a challenge,” Feldman said.

The Maryland Energy Administration is finalizing a rough draft of a report that will detail recommendations for how the state can meet is clean energy goals by 2035, and nuclear will inevitably part of the mix. A final report could be released by the end of the year.

Whether the report serves as a template for legislative action for Gov. Wes Moore’s administration remains to be seen.

“Alongside the state legislature and other stakeholders, the Moore-Miller Administration is continuing to explore all available options, including nuclear energy, to help to meet Maryland’s environmental and energy goals,” Carter Elliot IV, a spokesperson for Moore (D), said in an email. “The governor looks forward to supporting legislation and initiatives that will help Maryland secure its clean energy future.”

Late last year, between Christmas and New Year’s Day, the Maryland Department of the Environment released a meaty document outlining what the state needs to do meet its lofty climate mandates. Price tag: A minimum of $10 billion. State policymakers are still struggling to come up with ways to pay for the recommendations, at a time when the state is anticipating significant revenue shortfalls.

It’s possible that any report on clean energy strategies for Maryland could also involve robust government investment — a significant stumbling block to the state’s ambitions.

If there is expansion of nuclear energy in Maryland in the future, it won’t be of the scale of another Calvert Cliffs power plant, because that’s not feasible given the fragile economics of the nuclear industry. When two new large reactors began operating at an existing Georgia nuclear plant in 2023 and 2024, respectively, it marked the first time that a large-scale nuclear facility opened or expanded in the U.S. in almost 40 years.

But nuclear advocates are increasingly optimistic about the commercial and operational prospects of a new technology known as small modular reactors, which can be located at far smaller sites than a full-scale nuclear plant operation. The federal government is pouring billions of dollars into research for the technology, and one of the beneficiaries is X-Energy Reactor Co. LLC, a company located in Rockville, just down the road from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission headquarters.

Yet even the most optimistic proponents of small modular reactors believe it will be a minimum of seven years before any of those facilities are operational and supplying power to the electric grid. And Charkoudian believes that unlike existing technologies that haven’t been fully adopted yet in the U.S., it is especially difficult to ask taxpayers and utility ratepayers to make investments in these facilities because they aren’t visible anywhere yet.

“It’s just not commercially available,” she said. “At least you can see that offshore wind exists in Europe. There’s no question about whether they’re viable.”

Data points

Any conversation about the need to generate more clean energy — and more energy altogether — cannot take place without discussing the likelihood that energy-consuming data centers are coming to Maryland. Even without data centers, Maryland needs more energy generation and transmission. With them, the need expands exponentially.

“Data centers are like a huge tick that you put on our grid, and wherever you put it, they can start sucking that energy out,” said Wilson, the House Economic Matters chair.

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Already there is controversy over a proposed transmission line project that would run through three Maryland counties on its way to data centers in Northern Virginia. And while a big data center hub is in the early stages of development in Frederick County, some big technology companies are now eyeing the Calvert Cliffs nuclear property as a possible location for a data center.

During this year’s legislative session, as lawmakers debated a measure to restructure the electricity market in Maryland, the House attempted to insert an amendment that dealt with the complicated topic of onsite electricity generation and how electric suppliers interact with their largest commercial customers. It would have effectively prevented Constellation from building a data center on the Calvert Cliffs property.

The amendment was dropped on the final day of the legislative session after House-Senate negotiations, but Constellation continues to talk to tech companies about a data center at Calvert Cliffs. It isn’t a widespread practice in the industry yet, but it’s likely to become one: Talen Energy Corp., which operates the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station nuclear plant in Berwick, Pa., generates electricity for an adjacent data center, which it sold earlier this year to Amazon Web Services.

And Constellation announced Friday that it had reached an agreement with Microsoft to reopen the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania – site of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, in 1979 – to help power Microsoft’s data centers. Under the agreement, the plant, which was mothballed in 2019, could reopen as soon as 2028.

“It makes perfect sense to place a data center adjacent to your power providing center,” said Del. Mark N. Fisher (R-Calvert), whose district includes the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant. “The closer you are to the power supply, the more secure your data center is.”

But that potential development has also sparked a debate about whether a data center next to a nuclear site would effectively be siphoning off a significant portion of power that’s meant to go on the electric grid.

“We’ve been telling our customers that [nuclear plants] are there for the grid, but now we’re taking them off the grid,” said Vincent Duane, a principal at Copper Monarch LLC, an electricity markets and cybersecurity consulting firm. He spoke at a conference on data centers last month sponsored by the Maryland Tech Council.

Nuclear advocates counter that the electricity is going to be consumed anyway, regardless of whether the data center is near a power plant or not. Setting up a data center that feeds directly off a power plant will reduce the need for expensive electric transmission updates, they argue, and income that the nuclear company takes in from a data center could prompt more investments and more efficient power generation at the nuclear plant.

“You have a question of configuration — how do you plug it in?” said Emnett, the Constellation executive. “Do you plug it in to the generator or do you plug it in to the grid?”

That’s one of many questions that Maryland policymakers and regulators will have to consider as they contemplate the possible expansion of nuclear energy in the state.