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Exelon Announces Early Retirement of Clinton Power Station

Exelon Corporation today announced it will move forward to shut down the Clinton and Quad Cities nuclear plants, given the lack of progress on Illinois energy legislation.

The Clinton Power Station in Clinton, Ill., will close on June 1, 2017.

 

Quad Cities and Clinton have lost a combined $800 million in the past seven years, despite being two of Exelon’s best-performing plants.

 

While the Illinois legislative session has not ended, the path forward for consideration of the Next Generation Energy Plan legislation is not clear. As a result, Exelon has begun taking necessary steps to shut down the two nuclear plants.

 

That includes making permanent shutdown notifications to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission within 30 days, terminating capital investment projects required for long-term operation of Clinton and Quad Cities, which will impact more than 200 workers, immediately taking one-time charges of $150 million to $200 million for 2016, and accelerating approximately $2 billion in depreciation and amortization through the announced shutdown dates and cancelling fuel purchases and outage planning, which will impact more than 1,000 outage workers.

 

Exelon has and will continue to brief the Governor’s office, legislative leaders, the Illinois Commerce Commission, Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, Illinois Power Agency, other relevant state agencies, and host community leaders, on developments as it executes the shutdown plan.

 

Retiring the plants will have a significant economic and environmental impact on the region. The Clinton and Quad Cities plants support approximately 4,200 direct and indirect jobs and produce more than $1.2 billion in economic activity annually. A state report found that closing the plants would increase wholesale energy costs for the region by $439 million to $645 million annually. The report also found that keeping the plants open would avoid $10 billion in economic damages associated with higher carbon emissions over 10 years.

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