Exelon Corporation said Friday that its Clinton nuclear plant, 23 miles southeast of Bloomington, Ill., had cleared the 2016-2017 Mid-continent Independent System Operator (MISO) capacity auction, which meant that it would continue to operate through May 31, 2017, although its future after that would rely in an "urgent" policy fix.
The company said it was “committed to operate” the plant through May 2017; “however, the plant continues to lose money and will have to be shut down unless a combination of market and energy policy reforms are implemented to level the playing field for all zero-carbon resources and recognize nuclear energy for its environmental, economic, rate stability and reliability benefits.”
Exelon said it would not wait indefinitely to make a decision on the future of the plant past the fifth month of 2017. It would make that decision sometime this year, the company said.
Exelon President and Chief Executive Officer Chris Crane said there would be “no choice but to prepare for a potential early retirement in the face of continued financial losses,” unless there was an “urgent” policy directive that would change market dynamics.
He said the loss of the plant on an environmental scale would be equal to the loss of “80 percent of the wind installed in Illinois,” which would set back carbon reduction goals significantly.
According to a state of Illinois report, closing Clinton would trigger a jump in wholesale energy prices by $236 million to $341 million just to families and businesses in the region.
Those are costs that do not include “hundreds of millions of dollars that would need to be spent on new transmission lines,” the company said.
The losses would also include 1,900 jobs that are directly or indirectly supported by the Clinton plant, which has an environmental mitigation value the equivalent of an additional 1.7 million cars on the state's roads – a $4 billion value over the course of only nine years, the report said.
Exelon said it was ready, willing, and able to work with lawmakers and other stakeholders to finding a solution that would “promote clean energy and advance development of the next-generation power grid.”