Georgia Power announced Monday that Plant Vogtle Unit 3 has entered commercial operation. It’s now sending power to the grid for customers. Unit 3 is the first nuclear reactor crews have built from scratch in the U.S. in 40 years. Plant Vogtle Unit 4 is expected to go online next year.
As the state’s largest utility company, Georgia Power is also the majority stakeholder at Vogtle. Company president and CEO Kim Greene says the Plant Vogtle expansion will provide “clean, safe, reliable, and affordable energy” for decades to come.
“Today’s achievement is a testament to our commitment to doing just that, and it marks the first day of the next 60 to 80 years that Vogtle Unit 3 will serve our customers with clean, reliable energy,” Greene said in a press release.
At its full output of 1,100 megawatts of electricity, Unit 3 can power 500,000 homes and businesses. Once all four units are online, the Plant Vogtle site will be the largest generator of clean energy in the nation, company officials say.
Cost overruns and schedule delays
The fourth reactor is nearing completion at the site southeast of Augusta, where two earlier reactors have been generating electricity for decades.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Friday that workers could load radioactive fuel into Unit 4. They are expected to do that before the end of September. Unit 4 should enter commercial operation by March.
Workers started building the new reactors at Plant Vogtle in 2009. At that time, they expected Unit 3 to go online by 2016. Schedule delays and cost overruns have plagued the project, ballooning from an original estimate of $14 billion to $31 billion.
Georgia Power owns 46% of Vogtle, making it the plant’s majority owner. The other co-owners are Oglethorpe Power Corp., Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia, and Dalton Electric.
