NextEra Energy plans to restart the 50-year-old Iowa nuclear power plant it shut down in 2020 and sell some of its output to Google for data center operations.

The target date for resumed operation of the 615-MW Duane Arnold Energy Center is the first quarter of 2029.

NextEra and Google announced the 25-year power purchase agreement late Oct. 27, and NextEra elaborated in its third-quarter earnings report Oct. 28.

Central Iowa Power Cooperative and Corn Belt Power Cooperative will surrender their 30% ownership stake in the facility to NextEra in return for NextEra assuming their liability for decommissioning.

Central Iowa and Google will purchase the full output of the plant on equal terms, which were not disclosed but which are expected to contribute annually an adjusted 16 cents on average to NextEra’s earnings per share for the first 10 years of the agreement.

NextEra CEO John Ketchum said the company is not ready to disclose the expected cost of recommissioning.

For comparison, Constellation estimates a $1.6 billion price tag to restart the former Three Mile Island Unit 1, a pressurized-water reactor commissioned and retired at roughly the same time as the Duane Arnold reactor, which is smaller and uses the less-complex boiling water design.

Ketchum said the same team that has been doing the decommissioning will bring the facility back to operational status, and some of the employees who formerly operated Duane Arnold are expected to be rehired.

NextEra announced plans to shut down the facility in 2018, in an era when multiple U.S. nuclear plants had become uneconomical due to their high cost of operation and were being retired.

Duane Arnold ceased operation even sooner than planned when an August 2020 windstorm damaged its cooling towers.

Not even five years later, the nuclear power landscape began to change dramatically as demand for power — particularly the emissions-free baseload power provided by atomic fission — began to rise.

The very small number of retired but not disassembled U.S. nuclear plants have become a potentially valuable commodity, able to come back online at a fraction of the cost in time and money of a comparable new facility.

Two other retired nuclear power plants have begun recommissioning processes; the operational lives of existing reactors are being extended rather than cut short; construction may resume on a half-built, two-reactor facility mothballed eight years ago; uprating is planned for existing plants; and corporate offtake agreements are being signed for existing reactors as well as for advanced nuclear technologies that have not even reached prototype testing.

In this environment, NextEra considers the Duane Arnold restart a good move. The company still needs regulatory approvals but has begun the process of obtaining them. (See NextEra Closer to Recommissioning Duane Arnold with FERC Waivers.)

“Because we carefully and methodically went through the decommissioning process, we have confidence in the investment required to restart it,” Ketchum said. NextEra expects the recommissioned facility to qualify for the full range of available federal tax credits, he said.

The first quarter of 2029 is the latest the restart would be expected, Ketchum said. It could be as soon as the fourth quarter of 2028.

NextEra and Google also announced an agreement to explore development of new nuclear generation across the United States.

Counting Duane Arnold, the two companies have executed more than 3.5 GW of energy projects nationwide.

NextEra Energy reported GAAP earnings of $2.44 billion or $1.18/share on revenue of $7.97 billion in the third quarter of 2025, up from $1.85 billion, $0.90/share and $7.57 billion in the same quarter a year earlier.