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Constellation acquires Calpine in $27 bn deal
USA Mergers & acquisitions Constellation and Calpine Corp. have entered into a definitive agreement under which Constellation will acquire Calpine in a cash and stock transaction valued at an equity purchase price of approximately $16.4 billion, consisting of 50 million shares of Constellation stock and $4.5 billion in cash plus the assumption of approximately $12.7 billion of Calpine net debt. After accounting for cash that is expected to be generated by Calpine between signing and the expected closing date, as well as the value of tax attributes at Calpine, the net purchase price is $26.6 bn.
The deal with Calpine’s private equity owners,
which include an affiliate of Energy Capital Partners and other investors, is one of the biggest in the history of power generation. The agreement creates the USA’s largest clean energy provider and its leading competitive retail electricity supplier. Constellation already owns and operates the largest fleet of nuclear plants in the United States. Calpine is the country’s largest producer of energy from low-emission natural gas generation and has an expanded renewable energy portfolio, including the largest geothermal generation operation in the USA. Calpine has a fleet of 78 energy facilities – including natural gas-fired, geothermal, solar
and battery storage, representing around 27 GW of capacity and holds a majority stake in ‘The Geysers,’ a collection of 19 geothermal power plants outside Sonoma, California that is collectively the largest producer of geothermal power in North America, at 725 MW. Calpine is also running carbon capture pilot projects at multiple gas-fired plants.
Bloomberg reports that Constellation sees the deal as a chance to expand its power generation portfolio at a time of record growth in electricity demand. After years of flat demand, electricity load growth forecasts have exploded, largely driven by data centres, industry and electrification.
‘Nuclear fusion cannot balance renewables’ – German parliament report
Germany Nuclear fusion Future nuclear fusion power plants will not be able to complement wind and solar electricity production because they will likely need to run around the clock for economic and technical reasons, concludes a German parliamentary report by the parliament’s office of technology assessment (TAB). But even though the technology will arrive too late to help Europe on its way to climate neutrality by mid-century, it could operate well in industry applications such as hydrogen production, or form part of future electricity systems that are not entirely dominated by renewables, according to some experts.
‘In order to compensate for the fluctuating
feed-in of solar and wind power, quickly controllable power plants with low investment costs are required,’ the report says. ‘Fusion power plants will not be able to fulfil this task in the foreseeable future.’
The TAB is an independent scientific institution set up to advise parliament and its committees with impartial analyses on technological developments and their impact on society. Germany’s former research minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger had called nuclear fusion “a huge opportunity to solve all our energy problems” and boosted research with a new funding programme in 2023. But critics warned that enthusiasm for nuclear fusion is a harmful distraction because the technology will
be too late and too expensive to contribute to creating a climate-neutral energy system in the coming years and decades.
The report for parliament emphasises that fusion power reactors are still a long way away despite recent advances, even though it is based on the assumption that the first step – a plasma that can generate energy – will function reliably in the near future. But many technical hurdles on the way to a proper fusion power plant remain unsolved, the report stresses. Nuclear fusion experts not involved with the report agreed that fusion power plants will not become a reality before 2045, the year Germany aims to become climate-neutral, even under ideal circumstances.
“With significantly higher subsidies and approval procedures suitable for fusion, the first power plant could be connected to the grid around 20 years after the start of an ambitious programme,” Sibylle Günter, scientific director of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, told the Science Media Centre.
But Günter questioned the report’s finding that fusion power plants will not harmonise well with renewables. “Fusion power plants can interact very well and sensibly with renewables in a future electricity market,” Günter said, adding that they “could provide electricity when needed and produce chemical energy storage such as hydrogen at other times”. “Furthermore, it is not possible today to make a serious forecast of either Germany’s or the world’s energy situation in the second half of the century,” Günter said, suggesting that fusion plants could also supply heat for industry, or be used to produce artificial fuels such as hydrogen, run CO2
capture, and Fusion reactor at the Max Planck Institute 4 | January/February 2025|
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