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DOE offers Vistra up to $4.2B to boost three nuclear plants

The conditional loan commitment covers uprates at Beaver Valley, Davis-Besse and Perry that the Energy Department says would add 433 megawatts and keep nearly 4 gigawatts online.

Motion Media News Staff

Oct 6, 2026

3 minutes

Two concrete cooling towers, one releasing a plume of steam, rise behind the entrance road and low buildings of the Perry nuclear plant under a blue sky.

Photo: Cards84664, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons (cropped) (source)

The Energy Department on Monday, Oct. 5, offered Vistra a conditional commitment for loans of up to $4.2 billion to raise output at three of its nuclear plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio, the department said.

The offer comes from DOE's Office of Energy Dominance Financing, the lending office formerly known as the Loan Programs Office. It would pay for power increases, called uprates, and modernization work at the Beaver Valley plant in Pennsylvania and at the Davis-Besse and Perry plants in Ohio.

According to DOE, the work would keep nearly 4 gigawatts of existing generation running and add 433 megawatts of capacity, which it said is enough for more than 3 million homes. The department estimated about 3,000 project jobs in engineering, construction and outage work, and said the upgrades would help the plants run for 20 more years beyond their current licenses. The commitment also carries an option to finance future uprates at Vistra's Comanche Peak plant in Texas.

"By getting more power out of the nuclear plants we already have, we can deliver more affordable, reliable, around the-clock energy," Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in the release. DOE tied the deal to rising demand in the 13-state PJM Interconnection grid region and to President Donald Trump's executive order on the nuclear industrial base.

The Meta contracts

The 433-megawatt figure matches the uprate capacity that Meta agreed in January to buy from Vistra under 20-year power purchase agreements, POWER reported. Back then, Vistra said deliveries to Meta would start in late 2026, with the extra capacity phased in through 2034, according to the trade publication.

Perry is slated to go first. In a January letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Vistra said it expected to seek a 16% increase in Perry's licensed thermal power in an application it planned to file during the back half of 2029, POWER reported. Filings for the two Beaver Valley units and for Davis-Besse would follow through 2032.

DOE's lending office told Ohio's State Historic Preservation Office on Sept. 15 that it was weighing a loan guarantee for an extended uprate at Perry, and that construction there was expected to start in October 2026, POWER reported.

What's next

A conditional commitment is not a loan. Vistra still has to meet technical, legal, environmental and financial conditions before DOE signs final financing documents and releases money, the department said, a point also reported by MarketWatch and the American Public Power Association. DOE did not say when it expects to close the loan. Each uprate also requires its own application to the NRC under the filing schedule Vistra has laid out, according to POWER.