WASHINGTON - Alphabet's Google said on Monday it signed the world's first corporate agreement to buy power from multiple small modular reactors as the technology company looks to meet electricity demand from artificial intelligence.
"We feel like nuclear can play an important role in helping to meet our demand ... cleanly in a way that's more around the clock," Michael Terrell, senior director for energy and climate at Google, told reporters on a call. U.S. data center power use is expected to roughly triple between 2023 and 2030 and will require about 47 gigawatts of new generation capacity, according to Goldman Sachs estimates, which assumed natural gas, wind and solar power would fill the gap.
Small modular reactors are intended to be smaller than today's reactors with components built in a factory, instead of onsite, to help cut construction costs.Critics say SMRs will be expensive because they may not be able to achieve the economy of scale of larger plants. In addition, they will likely produce long-lasting nuclear waste for which the country does not yet have a final repository.