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Wright Joins the Crane Clean Energy Center Press Conference, Dec. 17, 2025

December 17, 2025 · U.S. Department of Energy · 0:42:13

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Energy Secretary Chris Wright joined a press conference at the Crane Clean Energy Center outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania — the plant formerly known as Three Mile Island — in the Department of Energy’s upload of the December 17, 2025 event, alongside Constellation and Microsoft representatives. Constellation’s leadership said the federal loan supporting the restart would be repaid, with the interest savings plowed back into the plant to bring it fully back to life, at more output than the day it was shut down, in the summer of 2027, as the timeline was stated at the event, and put the industry-wide restart effort at 10 gigawatts of returning power.

Wright said the plant closed not at the end of its life but because subsidy economics had undermined coal, nuclear, and gas plants that deliver at peak demand — and predicted the Crane plant will still be running at the end of this century. In the administration’s first 10 to 11 months, he said, it had already stopped the closure of over 15 gigawatts of power production capacity, against a little over 100 gigawatts of reliable firm capacity that, on his department’s data, had been slated to close. He also said the Palisades restart in Michigan — his department’s first — would come online perhaps next month, and argued that states welcoming new load and data centers are the states with flat or below-inflation electricity prices.

Why it matters

Crane is the flagship of Wright’s restart doctrine: a prematurely closed nuclear plant returned to the grid with a repaid federal loan, presented as the template for Palisades and the wider 10-gigawatt restart effort — and as proof, in his telling, that keeping firm capacity open is the road to lower prices rather than higher ones.

Scoreboard candidate

Scoreboard candidate: the Crane Clean Energy Center restart as presented on December 17, 2025 — full return at above its shutdown-day output in the summer of 2027 on Constellation’s stated timeline, backed by a repayable federal loan — alongside Secretary Wright’s figures as he stated them (over 15 gigawatts of closures stopped; a little over 100 gigawatts of firm capacity previously slated to close). Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of Energy, “Secretary Wright Joins Crane Press Conference - December 17, 2025” (official upload, embedded above; remarks as delivered by Secretary Wright and the event speakers).