Public Citizen Testimony Against Funding the Texas Nuclear Power Fund
Public Citizen Testimony Against Funding the Texas Nuclear Power Fund
To: Chairman Greg Bonnen and the Members of the House Committee on Appropriations
CC: Vice Chair, Mary E. González, Rep. Jeff Barry, Rep. Nicole Collier, Rep. Mano DeAyala, Rep. Caroline Fairly, Rep. Cassandra Garcia Hernandez, Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, Rep. Vikki Goodwin, Rep. Brian Harrison, Rep. Donna Howard, Rep. Venton Jones, Rep. Stan Kitzman, Rep. Janie Lopez, Rep. J. M. Lozano, Rep. John Lujan, Rep. Christian Manuel, Rep. Armando Martinez, Rep. Tom Oliverson, Rep. Angelia Orr, Rep. Toni Rose, Rep. Lauren A. Simmons, Rep. Shelby Slawson, Rep. Carl Tepper, Rep. Denise Villalobos, Rep. Armando Walle, Rep. Gene Wu
Via hand delivery and by email.
From: Adrian Shelley, Public Citizen, ashelley@citizen.org, 512-477-1155
Re: HB 500 – testimony by Public Citizen
Dear Chairman Bonnen and Members of the Committee:
Public Citizen appreciates the opportunity to provide this testimony on HB 500 to the House Committee on Appropriations. We are opposed to the creation of the Texas Nuclear Power fund because we do not believe taxpayer dollars should be spent on speculative and expensive new nuclear energy projects.
Advanced nuclear energy projects are too expensive to succeed in the ERCOTR power market.
One of the great successes of ERCOT is the affordability that diversifying the power grid has provided to Texas consumers. Texas has some of the cheapest power in the nation at an average of 10.04 cents/kWh.1 Advanced nuclear energy projects are not cost competitive with wind, solar, or even gas and battery storage.
The only publicly traded company in the United States trying to build small modular reactors (SMRs) is NuScale. NuScale cancelled six SMRs proposals in Idaho after cost overruns of 250%.2
NuScale also recently abandoned the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems project due to financial challenges.3 Even optimistic projections had the project generating electricity for $4,200 per kilowatt. That ultimately proved too optimistic, as the project was cancelled due to inflating cost projects.
The TVA project mentioned above was projected to cost $17,949 per kilowatt.4
By contrast, wind energy could be installed for $1,391 per kilowatt in 2019.5
Nuclear is also not cost competitive with solar, even with solar farms are paired with battery storage to add dispatchability. The financial firm Lazard gave the following unsubsidized levelized costs for energy in June 2024:6
- Solar plus storage: $60 – 210 per MWh
- Nuclear: $142 – 222 per MWh.
Texas should not invest taxpayer dollars in new technologies for which the total cost is not even known. Under current market conditions nuclear energy simply cannot compete in the ERCOT energy market.
The Texas Nuclear Power Fund is too open-ended and lacks proper oversight.
We are concerned that HB 500 includes no specific dollar figure for the Texas Nuclear Power Fund. A single project could easily spend hundreds of million of dollars in taxpayer funds without even succeeding in producing power. This is because both the Tier One and Tier Two funds in HB 14 can be awarded well before a project is built and producing power.
Furthermore, there is no requirement in HB 14 that a nuclear project that receives state funding actually produces electricity that is placed into the ERCOT grid. It would be possible for a new nuclear generation project to receive funding from the Texas Nuclear Power Fund and then sell all of its power behind the meter to a large user or users such as an artificial intelligence (AI) data center or a bitcoin mine. This is unlike the Texas Energy Fund, which does actually require that TEF funded projects produce power that is put onto the ERCOT grid.
Finally, HB 14 houses the fund in the Governor’s office with little oversight from appropriate regulatory agencies. For these reasons, we think the fund is too broad and not well tailored ot the goal of producing extra power that is included in the ERCOT grid.
In conclusion, we ask you to remove the Texas Nuclear Power fund from HB 500 because it will not lead to new, affordable electricity generation in the ERCOT power market.