Danny Osei has run cranes at the Port of Victoria, Texas, for eleven years. He has unloaded wind turbine blades, chemical tankers, and grain ships. Last week, something different crossed a desk two miles from his crane. It was the first SMR interconnection Texas has ever logged, a filing for a nuclear reactor that doesn’t exist yet.
A Maryland startup called Blue Energy Global filed the request with ERCOT, the operator that keeps the Texas grid running. ERCOT confirmed it’s the first request of its kind the agency has ever received, according to Big Energy News.
The First SMR Interconnection Texas Has Seen
Blue Energy wants to build up to five BWRX-300 reactors on 1,600 acres at the Port of Victoria. Each one is a 300-megawatt boiling water design from GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy. Together, they would add up to 1.5 gigawatts of nuclear power, enough to run roughly 260,000 Texas homes.
The power isn’t going straight to homes, though. Crusoe, an AI company building a data center campus next door, will use it instead, the kind of facility driving a lot of today’s grid demand strain.
“We are shifting from the old way of building large reactor nuclear power to instead do it the ‘Blue Way,’” said Jake Jurewicz, Blue Energy’s CEO and co-founder.
Gas First, Nuclear Right Behind It
Here’s the part that makes this plan realistic instead of just hopeful. Blue Energy isn’t waiting on the reactors to deliver power.
- Two natural gas turbines come online first, adding about 1 gigawatt starting in 2030 and 2031.
- The BWRX-300 units follow, with the first expected around 2032 or 2033.
- Blue Energy submitted the first piece of its construction permit application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September.
Gas bridges the gap while the reactors go through licensing. Blue Energy says that approach can deliver power in about 48 months, compared with the ten-plus years a conventional nuclear project usually takes from groundbreaking to first electricity. Constellation, the utility behind the Calvert Cliffs uprate, liked the plan enough to make an equity investment in Blue Energy back in July, its first bet on a US small modular reactor developer.
What This Means for Your Power Bill
Picture a different reader: Renata, a dental hygienist in San Antonio who has lived through two summer blackout scares on ERCOT’s grid. She will probably never see these reactors from her kitchen window. But she benefits anyway, because the power for Crusoe’s data center comes from a plant built just for it, not from the same pool of generation she competes for on a 105-degree August afternoon.
That separation matters more than it sounds. ERCOT lets wholesale electricity prices spike as high as $5,000 per megawatt-hour when supply runs tight, roughly a hundred times the normal rate. Every megawatt a data center pulls from the existing grid during one of those crunches pushes prices higher for everyone bidding against it. A reactor built to feed one customer keeps that bidding war out of the regular market.
The BWRX-300 design behind this plan isn’t an unproven idea, either. The same reactor is already under construction at Ontario Power Generation’s Darlington site in Canada, which GE Vernova’s Eric Gray calls the only small modular reactor under construction anywhere in the Western world right now.
The Catch Nobody’s Ignoring
None of this is locked in yet. Blue Energy hasn’t set a construction permit date beyond “2027,” and Texas regulators have temporarily slowed new data center hookups amid local pushback over water and land use, according to Energy Connects‘ reporting. A filing is a first step, not a finished reactor.
Still, somebody had to file first. Every SMR developer eyeing the Texas grid now has a template to follow, and a faster, cheaper one than starting from scratch. Watch whether ERCOT clears this application in months instead of years. That answer will tell you more about America’s real SMR timeline than any press release will.