Cambridge, MA. November 18, 2024 - Terra Praxis is introducing new AI capabilities to the advanced nuclear market that will significantly accelerate the licensing and permitting processes for advanced nuclear energy and other clean energy sources. By integrating with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Terra Praxis is bringing these transformative capabilities to industry and government, with the potential to advance preliminary license applications to repurpose hundreds of retiring and retired coal plant and nuclear sites for advanced nuclear development.
A recent report from the US Department of Energy identified the opportunity to add up to 174 GWe of new nuclear capacity at 145 retired or retiring coal plant sites, and up to 95 GWe additional capacity at existing nuclear plant sites. Terra Praxis is designing solutions to operationalize this opportunity to maximize existing transmission assets, protect jobs, increase energy security, and massively boost the supply of reliable clean energy.
Typically, the cost of producing an Early Site Permit (ESP) application for one site ranges between $25M-$40M, representing a major barrier to clean energy development today. Terra Praxis integrates Azure OpenAI Service to train generative AI models on existing nuclear regulatory and licensing documents, as well as additional datasets, such as geographical and seismic data for the selected sites, to streamline the process of preparing high quality and compliant licensing and permitting applications for regulatory review.
The AI copilot can draft preliminary ESP applications, radically enhancing the productivity of permitting engineers and reducing the time and cost to produce those early drafts – potentially from years to hours or days – and for a fraction of the cost.
“The AI copilot eliminates years, and tens of millions of dollars, required today to manually produce these site license applications, which represent a major barrier to clean energy development,” said Kirsty Gogan, Founding Director and Co-CEO, Terra Praxis.
Overall benefits of these AI capabilities include:
1. Industry Development: AI-enabled site suitability evaluation and license application development can eliminate cost and schedule-driven barriers, enabling supply chain investments for programmatic deployments and rapid additions of clean energy to the existing grid.
2. Advancing Site Permitting: Production of early site permit applications for fleets of sites, and potentially even the Combined Operating Licenses.
3. Informed Decision-Making: These capabilities will provide prompt and meaningful, compliance-related evaluations to prioritize suitable sites for subsequent licensing applications.
4. Efficiency: The AI-enabled toolset is capable of rapid creation of high-fidelity licensing documentation to support rapid and simultaneous application development to enable fleet deployment.
These innovations are the product of a two-year collaboration between Terra Praxis’ nonprofit REPOWER initiative and Microsoft, combining energy sector and digital technology expertise. The initiative’s goal is to build and deploy a suite of tools to automate the evaluation, design, and regulatory approval processes needed to repurpose coal plants with advanced nuclear and transform them into viable clean energy investment opportunities.
Most recently, Microsoft technology has helped Terra Praxis enable mass creation of permitting documents for a whole fleet of coal plants. This functionality is being used by Terra Praxis to investigate preparing licensing applications for every plant in the U.S. for a fraction of the current cost.
“The radical time and cost savings enabled by AI, and the capacity to apply them to a whole fleet of retiring coal plants, has very important implications for the financing and deployment of advanced reactors. It could provide a large pipeline of orders for numerous sites to be ready for development, transforming the supply chain and the way reactor vendors are designing their products,” said Eric Ingersoll, Founding Director and Co-CEO, Terra Praxis. “Making hundreds of existing retiring sites ready for clean energy development could be a transformative step for communities facing an uncertain future.”
Microsoft is part of Terra Praxis’ REPOWER Consortium, which is executing an integrated strategy to deploy fast, low-cost, and repeatable solutions for repurposing existing coal plants to continue operating with emissions-free power, heat, and steam supplied by mass-manufactured heat sources—and supplying this clean energy to energy intensive infrastructure including steel, cement, aviation and shipping. These generative AI capabilities could enable fleet-wide licensing applications and regulatory approval to repurpose 2,400 coal-fired power plants worldwide to run on carbon-free energy, helping transition one of the world’s largest sources of carbon to zero emissions.
Repowering coal plants leverages existing sites, infrastructure, transmission lines, industry knowledge, workforces, capital, and supply chains to accelerate the clean energy transition. It also ensures continuity for communities reliant on existing power plants for energy, jobs, tax revenue, and continued economic development. Decarbonizing coal plants would eliminate almost one-third of global net annual CO2 emissions or around 15 billion tonnes of CO2 from the planet per year.
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About Terra Praxis
Terra Praxis is a global nonprofit organization committed to universal access to affordable, reliable, and clean energy that empowers people and protects nature. Powered by philanthropy, we innovate and accelerate scalable, equitable solutions to decarbonize the largest sources of global emissions (the difficult-to-decarbonize sectors of coal-for-power, industrial heat, aviation, and heavy transport). Terra Praxis and its global REPOWER Consortium are driving the necessary market, policy, and regulatory innovations that will enable billions of dollars of investment in redirecting our climate trajectory.
On September 15, 2022, Terra Praxis and Microsoft signed an agreement to deliver digital solutions to tackle a significant decarbonization challenge – repurposing over 2,400 coal-fired power plants worldwide to run on carbon-free energy. The open access EVALUATE application released at COP 27 enables stakeholders to quickly evaluate the business case for repowering a coal plant or fleet. It provides global data on the 2,400 coal plants worldwide to provide estimated costs, savings, reduced carbon emissions, and a comparison to alternative technologies. On “Energy Day” at COP28, Microsoft published a comprehensive new Policy Brief on the vital role of nuclear energy in meeting our clean energy goals: Accelerating a Carbon-Free Future: Microsoft Policy Brief on Advanced Nuclear and Fusion Energy, citing the strategic collaboration with Terra Praxis on REPOWER as an example of how Microsoft is leveraging digital technology to support an inclusive decarbonized energy system.
Terra Praxis does not receive any funding from Microsoft.
Collaboration:
Learn more about the partnership between Terra Praxis and Microsoft.