Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced plans Monday to further transition the Department of Energy’s major loan-granting office away from its Biden-era focus on renewable power sources and toward boosting nuclear energy.
Wright said that the largest portion of funding from the Loan Programs Office, which was often referred to as former President Joe Biden’s “green bank,” would now be dedicated to nuclear energy.
“The biggest use of those dollars by far — the biggest use of those dollars will be for nuclear power plants, to get those first plants built,” Wright said at the American Nuclear Society’s winter conference in Washington, D.C.
The LPO, which was established in 2005, saw its lending authority balloon under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to nearly $412 billion.
Under Biden, the LPO issued more than $107 billion worth of loans and loan guarantees for clean-energy focused initiatives, primarily involving renewable energy projects, electric vehicles, lithium mining, and more.
Now, though, the office — which the Trump administration has rebranded as the “energy dominance financing office” — is getting overhauled in line with the administration’s primary focus on reliable base-load power.
Nuclear energy is set to reap most of the benefits from the change, as the administration intends to use the office’s broad lending authority to accelerate the build-out of new nuclear power plants. The nuclear industry could reap hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding.
“We have significant lending authority at the Loan Programs Office,” Wright said in his keynote address.
There has long been speculation that the Trump administration would move to scale back the office’s lending capabilities dramatically. This would force the nuclear energy industry to rely on major investments from the private sector, which, for decades, has been averse to increasing capital in nuclear energy because of environmental and financial pressures.
In the last couple of years, major technology firms, banks, and even left-leaning environmentalists have changed their tune on nuclear power amid the soaring electricity demand brought on by artificial intelligence.
“I think the strong pull of AI for more electricity is going to bring in billions of dollars of equity capital in from very creditworthy providers,” Wright said Monday, explaining that the federal government plans to match those investments.
“That’ll be matched 3-to-1, maybe even up to 4-to-1, with low-cost debt dollars from the Loan Programs Office,” he added. “So together, industry, technology, offtakes, and the administration, we got to get nuclear going again, and I believe we can, but it will take all of us.”
In a series of executive orders signed this spring, President Donald Trump called on the United States to quadruple domestic nuclear power production by 2050 and have 10 new large reactors under construction by 2030.
The Trump administration has yet to announce any new major loan commitment for a nuclear power project and has only closed on one loan since Trump took office.
TRUMP FINALIZES $1.6 BILLION LOAN FROM GUTTED CLEAN ENERGY OFFICE
The Department of Energy announced last month that it finalized a $1.6 billion loan for a subsidiary of utility giant American Electric Power to upgrade nearly 5,000 miles of transmission lines.
The agency has released several loan disbursements to support the restart of the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan, which is poised to be the first decommissioned nuclear facility to come back online in the U.S. The original loan for this project was finalized under Biden.
